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Appendix Works by and on Simmel

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by Jukka Gronow & Olli Pyyhtinen

Available from www.macmillanihe.com/pyyhtinen

This appendix provides entries on both works authored by Simmel and on

secondary literature on him. The main focus is on the English translations of his

works, but we have also included some original German texts that in our view best

reveal his theoretical position and are the most significant in relation to his

sociology and philosophy. The selection of secondary literature, too, covers both

works published in English and those published in German.

Simmel’s Works in German

From the long list of Simmel’s publications, now available in the German

complete edition of his collected works, we have selected into this part of the

bibliography those works which are most relevant to the understanding of his

sociological and philosophical thinking and which have not been translated into

English.

Collected works

Simmel’s collected works have been published as 24-volume Georg Simmel

Gesamtausgabe (GSG) series by Suhrkamp. The editing process, which was

initiated already in the 1980s was finally completed in 2015. The series contains

the complete works of Simmel. Volumes GSG 1–16 present Simmel’s

publications in chronological order; volume GSG 17 includes miscellaneous

writings as well as a number of anonymous and pseudonymous publications;

volume GSG 18 contains English publications and volume GSG 19 Simmel’s

publications in French and Italian; volume GSG 20 contains Simmel’s

posthumous publications and unpublished texts; GSG 21 includes sets of lecture

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A selection of this material was originally published in Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology

edited by Janeen Baxter, and has been reproduced by permission of Oxford University

Press [http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com].

http://www.macmillanihe.com/pyyhtinen

2 The Simmelian Legacy

notes by students from Simmel’s courses; to volumes GSG 22 and GSG 23 are

collected the letters by Simmel that have been found and, finally, GSG 24 includes

a complete bibliography and biography with indices, documents and appendices.

The collected works have also been ordered, first, in terms of authorization (e.g.

by distinguishing the publications bearing Simmel’s name as the author from

anonymous and pseudonymous writings); second, in those of the type of

publication (by distinguishing independent works from essays, reviews and

miscellaneous texts); and, third, in those of periodization, by dividing Simmel’s

oeuvre into three periods: 1870-1900 (volumes GSG 1–6,), 1901-1908 (volumes

GSG 7–11), and 1908-1918 (volumes GSG 12–16). The volumes have various

editors, with Otthein Rammstedt acting as the General Editor of the whole series.

The volumes of the GSG series have become standard sources in the most recent

Simmel scholarship, and the series has also inspired and informed new insights

and interpretations in the secondary literature (with several leading Simmel

scholars involved in the editing process as editors of individual GSG volumes).

GSG 1 Das Wesen der Materie nach Kant's Physischer Monadologie;

Abhandlungen 1882-1884; Rezensionen 1883-1901. Georg Simmel

Gesamtausgabe Band 1. Ed. Klaus Christian Köhnke, Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp, 2000, 527 p.

The volume includes Simmel’s doctoral thesis, The Nature of Matter According

to Kant's Physical Monadology, and a collection of his essays from years 1882-

1884 as well as book reviews from years 1883-1901.

GSG 2 Aufsätze 1887-1890; Über sociale Differenzierung; Die Probleme der

Geschichtsphilosophe (1892). Ed. Heinz-Jürgen Dahme, 1989, 434 p.

This volume contains Simmel’s essays from years 1887-1890 as well as the books

On Social Differentiation and The Problems of the Philosophy of History.

GSG 3 Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. Eine Kritik der Ethischen

Grundbegriffe. Erster Band. Ed. Klaus Christian Köhnke, 1989, 461 p.

The volume contains the first of Simmel’s two-volume book Introduction to the

Science of Morality.

GSG 4 Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. Eine Kritik der Ethischen

Grundbegriffe. Zweiter Band. Ed. Klaus Christian Köhnke, 1991, 427 p.

The volume contains the second volume of Simmel’s book Introduction to the

Science of Morality.

GSG 5 Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1894–1900. Eds. Heinz-Jürgen Dahme &

David Frisby, 1992, 690 p.

This volume includes a collection of Simmel’s essays published between years

1894 and 1900.

Appendix 3

GSG 6 Philosophie des Geldes. Eds. David Frisby & Klaus Christian Köhnke,

1989, 787 p.

The volume presents Simmel’s book Philosophy of Money, first published in

1900.

GSG 7 Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908. Band I [Essays and Articles

1901-1908. Volume 1]. Eds. Rüdiger Kramme, Angela Rammstedt & Otthein

Rammstedt, 1995, 382 p.

The volume contains the first volume of Simmel’s essays and articles from years

1901-1908.

GSG 8 Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908. Band II. Eds. Alessandro Cavalli

& Volkhard Krech. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993, 463 p.

The volume contains the second volume of Simmel’s essays and articles from

years 1901-1908.

GSG 9 Kant; Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. Eds. Guy Oakes & Kurt

Röttgers. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997, 485 p.

This volume includes Simmel’s book on Kant, which is based on fourteen

lectures, and the book The Problems of the History of Philosophy.

GSG 10 Philosophie der Mode; Die Religion; Kant und Goethe; Schopenhauer

und Nietzsche. Eds. Michael Behr, Volkhard Krech & Gert Schmidt, 1995, 497 p.

The volume contains three books, published in three successive years. The small

book Philosophy of Fashion was published in 1905, Kant and Goethe in 1906,

and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in 1907.

GSG 11 Soziologie: Untersichungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung

[Sociology: Inquiries into the Forms of Association]. Ed. Otthein Rammstedt,

1992, 1051 p.

The volume presents Simmel’s major work Sociology: Inquiries into the Forms of

Association, originally published in 1908.

GSG 12 Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1909–1918. Band I. Eds. Rüdiger Kramme

& Angela Rammstedt, 2001,586 p.

This volume contains the first volume of Simmel’s essays and articles published

between years 1909 and 1918.

GSG 13 Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1909–1918 Band II [Essays and Articles

1909-1918. Volume 2]. Ed. Klaus Latzel, 2000, 431 p.

This volume includes the second volume of Simmel’s essays and articles published

between years 1909 and 1918.


GSG 14 Hauptprobleme der Philosophie; Philosophische Kultur. Eds. Rüdiger

Kramme & Otthein Rammstedt, 1996, 530 p.

The volume presents the book Main Problems of Philosophy first published 1910

and the collection of essays Philosophical Culture that originally came out in 1911.

GSG 15 Goethe; Deutschlands innere Wandlung; Das Problem der historischen

Zeit; Rembrandt. Eds. Uta Kösser, Hans-Martin Kruckis & Otthein Rammstedt,

2003, 678 p.

The volume contains the book Goethe, the printed speech Germany’s Inner

Transformation, the essay ‘The Problem of Historical Time’, as well as the book

Rembrandt.

GSG 16 Der Krieg und die geistigen Entscheidungen; Grundfragen der

Soziologie; Vom Wesen des historischen Verstehens; Der Konflikt der modernen

Kultur; Lebensanschauung. Eds. Gregor Fitzi & Otthein Rammstedt, 1999, 516 p.

The volume includes Simmel’s wartime writings, The War and Spiritual

Decisions, the book Basic Problems of Sociology, the essays ‘On the Nature of

Historical Understanding’ and ‘The Conflict of Modern Culture’, as well as

Simmel’s last book, The View of Life, that came out in 1918, a few weeks after his

decease.

GSG 17 Miszellen, Glossen, Stellungnahmen, Umfrageantworten, Leserbriefe,

Diskussionsbeiträge 1889-1918; Anonyme und Pseudonyme Veröffentligungen

1888-1920. Ed. Klaus Christian Köhnke with Cornelia Jaenichen & Erwin

Schullerus, 2005, 626 p.

The volume contains miscellaneous texts, marginalia, statements, survey

responses, readers’ letters, as well as contributions to scholarly discussions by

Simmel between years 1889 and 1918, and it also includes his anonymous and

pseudonymous publications from 1888 to 1920.

GSG 18 Englischsprachige Veröffentlichungen 1893-1910. Ed. David Frisby,

2008, 548 p.

This volume contains a collection of Simmel’s publications in English.

GSG 19 Französisch- und italienischsprachige Veröffentlichungen; Mélanges de

philosophie relativiste. Eds. Christian Papilloud, Angela Rammstedt & Patrick

Watier, 2002, 458 p.

The volume presents Simmel’s publications in French and Italian, including a

collection of writings centring on his relativist philosophy.

GSG 20 Postume Veröffentlichungen; Ungedrucktes; Schuldpädagogik. Eds.

Torge Karlsruhen & Otthein Rammstedt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004,

Appendix 5

615 p.

The volume contains a collection of Simmel’s posthumous publications and

unpublished writings as well as the book School Pedagogy.

GSG 21 Kolleghefte und Mitschriften. Eds. Angela Rammstedt & Cécile Rol,

2012, 1343 p.

The volume contains a collection of lecture notes.

GSG 22 Briefe 1880–1911. Ed. Klaus Christian Köhnke. Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp, 2005, 1094 p.

The volume contains Simmel’s letters dated between 1880 and 1911.

GSG 23 Briefe 1912–1918; Jugendbriefe. Eds. Otthein Rammstedt & Angela

Rammstedt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008, 1241 p.

The volume contains Simmel’s letters from years 1912-1918 as well as letter from

his youth.

GSG 24 Indices, Gesamtbibliographie, Biographie, Dokumente, Nachträge. Ed.

Otthein Rammstedt (in preparation).

The volume contains indexes to the GSG series, a collected bibliography, a

biography, documents, and addenda.

Monographs

This section contains a small selection of Simmel’s monographs that have not yet

been translated into English. All of them hold a significant place in his oeuvre and

disclose important aspects of his thought. First, Simmel’s later insistence that

society and other seemingly static social formations need to be considered in terms

of processes and relations of reciprocal effect can be regarded as an extension of

the realistic-dynamic standpoint on matter that he develops in his doctoral thesis.

Further, the book Über sociale Differenzierung was his first major work, already

presenting many of the themes, such as the question of individuality, the concept

of society and the epistemological basis of the social sciences, on which he worked

pretty much throughout his whole career. Kant stands as a testimony of Simmel’s

sustained preoccupation with the work of Immanuel Kant. Finally, the book

Hauptprobleme der Philosophie presents Simmel’s view on the nature of

philosophy and also illustrates well his own philosophical approach.

Simmel, Georg, Das Wesen der Materie nach Kant's Physischer Monadologie

[The Nature of Matter According to Kant's Physical Monadology]. In GSG 1.

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000 [1880].


After his first dissertation had been rejected in 1880, Simmel obtained his

doctorate with this short work of 34 pages, for which he had received an academic

prize a year earlier. In the thesis, Simmel examines Kant’s conception of matter.

For Simmel’s sociology the work is of relevance especially due to its ‘realistic-

dynamic’ perspective. Against Kant, whom he criticizes for hypostasizing matter,

Simmel proposes that matter is not passive stuff, but a process, a flux of becoming

instead of being. It is fascinating to note the remarkable resemblance of Simmel’s

later sociological conception of society with this: much like matter, for Simmel

society, too, is, no finished product of forces, but something which happens each

and every moment.

Simmel, Georg: Über sociale Differenzierung [On Social Differentiation]. In GSG

2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989 [1890].

The overall theme of the book is differentiation, which owes to the evolutionary

scheme developed by Herbert Spencer in Principles of Sociology. Simmel in a

way generalizes the Spencerian principle of differentiation. Ultimately, he sees

modernization as a process of increasing differentiation.

The first chapter deals with the epistemology of the social sciences or, more

exactly, of sociology (which he at that point wrote with c and not z, ‘Sociologie’).

Simmel regards the relationship of the individual and the social group or society as

the foundational problem of the social sciences. In the chapter, he seeks to

overcome the individualistic standpoint to social life by specifying the forms of

being with (Zusammensein) as the specific object of sociological investigation. He

argues that even though in the last instance there exist only individual human

beings in their situations and movements, sociology reveals a specific layer of

reality by focusing on its social dimension. In the chapter, Simmel also suggests

that each and every unity is ultimately based on interaction of its parts, and that

this is also how we must understand society.

In the second chapter Simmel discusses collective responsibility from the

viewpoint of differentiation. He maintains that, due to the lack of differentiation, in

primitive societies criminal acts made by individuals are regarded as the

responsibility of the collectivity. With modernization, however, group ties have

loosened to the extent of allowing greater development of the individual and hence

also giving rise to individual responsibility.

The third chapter, which later appeared in Sociology in a revised form, investigates

the correlation between the quantitative enlargement of the group and the

development of individuality. Simmel contends that larger groups allow more

individual differentiation. The more distinctive and the smaller the group, the less

individuated its members are. And, the other way around, the looser and the

larger the social circles in which the individual lives, the more room there is for the

Appendix 7

development of the individuality. Modern society is for Simmel a world of

undifferentiated large groups or collectivities and differentiated individuals.

From the examination of the relationship between the expansion of the group and

the development of individuality Simmel turns in the fourth chapter to analysing

what he calls the social ‘level’. With it, he refers to the collective behaviour of a

group or a mass of people. According to Simmel, at its most basic, the social level

is characterized by a lack of individual differentiation. What all human beings have

in common can only be the possession of those who possess the least. Later in his

oeuvre Simmel was to consider this in terms of ‘sociological tragedy’: the attributes

which are common to all and which individuals take with themselves to form a

society with each others always tend to be the lowest and the primitive ones.

What is at stake in the process of differentiation for Simmel is, in the last instance,

individuality and individual freedom. They form the key themes of the fifth

chapter which, like the chapter on the expansion of the group, was later

incorporated in Sociology in slightly altered form. In the chapter, Simmel

formulates his famous idea of quantitative or sociological individuality, according

to which individuality has no inner essence but is maintained through the

combination of social circles. Membership in a large variety of circles enlarges the

social sphere to which we belong and therefore also provides opportunity for more

individual freedom. At the same time, however, the individual is thereby deprived

of the support and security of a closely-knit sphere. Groups uniting people with

common interests (i.e., bringing together homogeneous elements from

heterogeneous spheres) may nevertheless remain meaningful and significant to the

individuals.

The sixth and final chapter of the book discusses the differentiation of groups and

individuals in terms of the saving of energy. According to Simmel, all upward

development to more developed and thus more differentiated organisms is

dominated by the tendency to save energy. In the chapter, he also makes an

interesting analogy between thought and money, suggesting that both have come

into being through differentiation.

Simmel, Georg: Kant. Sechzehn Vorlesungen gehalten an der Berliner Universität

[Kant. Sixteen Lectures Given at the University of Berlin]. München und Leipzig:

Duncker & Humblot, 1904. (Also appears in GSG 9.)

The book is based on a lecture course on Kant Simmel gave at the University of

Berlin in Winter semester 1902/03. The book results from a long preoccupation

with Kant, as Simmel engaged with his philosophy already in a text from the year

1880 which formed the basis of his doctoral thesis defended the following year,

and Simmel had also been lecturing on Kant frequently ever since Summer

semester 1885.


In the preface, Simmel emphasizes that the book is no study into the history of

philosophy, but its approach is purely philosophical. Simmel engages above all

with Kant’s philosophical problems and answers in relation to the ‘vital issues’

(Lebensfragen of philosophy, and thus Simmel intends the book as also an

introduction to philosophical thought. More specifically, he sets out to interrogate

Kant’s scientific and what to Simmel also often appear as highly specialized

theories according to their philosophical value, that is, in light of their significance

for the understanding of life and for establishing a worldview.

And for Simmel, Kant’s philosophy is important in particular for introducing a

new concept of ‘experience’. Through it Kant’s work presents a ‘third’ between

rationalism and sensualism, as it combines the generality of reason with the

specificity of the senses.

Simmel, Georg: Hauptprobleme der Philosophie [Main Problems of Philosophy].

Berlin: G. J. Göschenäsche Verlagshanlung, 1910. (Also appears in GSG 14.)

The book is one of Simmel’s bestsellers. In only two weeks, it sold 8,500 copies,

and after the fifth edition, published in 1920, a total of 37,000 copies had been

printed. The book examines the nature of philosophy per se, at the most general

level. While doing so, it comes to reveal much of Simmel’s own philosophy. In

the book, he explicitly engages with the work of other philosophers, such as

Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Spinoza, Schleiermacher, Kant, Stirner, Fichte, and

Hegel. However, they make appearance only to serve the illumination and

treatment of the problems that Simmel himself considers as important and that

interest him. In methodological terms, the book ventures beyond accustomed

paths. The history of philosophy abounds with treatises that focus on the results of

philosophy, that is, on crystallized ideas, truth claims and theories. In contrast to

this, Simmel sets out to ‘enliven’ philosophical systems, to show their inner life

and movement. This shift from metaphysics as dogma to metaphysics as life

significantly anticipates Simmel’s later life-philosophy. He thinks that the essential

aspect of philosophy is not its content, its object of study, or certain dogmas or

results, but what is decisive is a specific intellectual attitude to the world and life as

well as the movement of thought, the process of doing philosophy. For Simmel,

the main problems of philosophy to which also the title of the book refers

concern, first, the essence of philosophy; second, the problem of the primacy

between being and becoming; third, the relation of subject and object; and fourth,

the ‘third’ realm of ideal contents beyond the subjective sphere and the objective

external world.

The book is divided into four chapters accordingly. In the first chapter, Simmel

suggests that what distinguishes philosophy from other disciplines is that in

philosophy one of its main questions, if not even the primary question, concerns

Appendix 9

the nature of the philosophy itself. Philosophy thus cannot be defined from

outside and before engaging in the actual practice of doing philosophy, but only

within philosophical practice. For Simmel, philosophy is ultimately defined by two

goals: on the one hand, by the aspiration to think without preconditions, and to

grasp the totality of things, on the other.

The second chapter contrasts philosophies that give primacy to being and unity

with those that place emphasis on becoming and multiplicity. Simmel traces the

first line of thought from Parmenides to Spinoza and all the way to

Schleiermacher. And it is Heraclitus, Hegel – whom Simmel regards as the most

radical philosopher of becoming – and lastly Nietzsche whom he identifies as

philosophers of becoming. Yet in the work of none of these philosophers Simmel

finds a satisfying solution to the problem of how to combine being and becoming

into a unified worldview, a task that he took himself later in his life-philosophy.

In chapter three Simmel discusses the relation of subject and object, as well as

various attempts to reconcile them that he finds in the work of Stirner, Kant,

Fichte, Leibniz, Spinoza, Schelling, and Plato. Simmel divides these solutions into

four: subjectivism, objectivism, metaphysical monism, and the neo-Kantian

doctrine of three worlds. He discusses the idea of the third world also in relation

to Plato’s Ideas, to which Simmel himself adopts a critical stance, lamenting Plato

for rendering the world of Ideas a metaphysical realm beyond concrete reality.

And, while Plato was able to express the nature and validity of things only in terms

of their being, Simmel stresses the importance of making a distinction between

validity and being: things may be valid, irrespective of whether they a realized or

not.

The fourth chapter takes up the idea of the third realm of contents and discusses it

in particular in the context of ethics. Simmel insists that ‘ideal demands’ (ideale

Forderungen) are not situated in the subject or in objective reality. They are not

imposed by ourselves or some other subjects; according to Simmel they are valid

regardless of whether they are conceived by a subject or not. But what ought does

not follow from what is, either, but ideal demands rather belong to a third realm

beyond both subject and object.

Edited volumes

A great number of Simmel’s important writings have appeared originally as essays

and articles later included in various edited volumes with often partly overlapping

contents. The collection Philosophische Kultur (Philosophical Culture), appeared

already in Simmel’s lifetime, in 1911, but the other three volumes presented here,


Gesammelte Schriften zur Religonssoziologie, Individualismus der modernen Zeit,

and Jenseits der Schönheit, have been published posthumously.

Simmel, Georg: Philosophische Kultur. Über das Abenteuer, die Geschlechter

und die Krise der Moderne. Gesammalte Essays mit einem Vorwort von Jürgen

Habermas [Philosophical Culture. On Adventure, the Sexes and the Crisis of

Modernity. Collected Essays with a Foreword by Jürgen Habermas]. Berlin: Klaus

Wagenbach, 1983. (In GSG 14.)

The collection of essays, edited by Simmel himself, includes many of his

important cultural-critical writings some of which had already appeared in other

contexts and/or as different versions elsewhere. Their themes vary from the

philosophies of gender, religion and culture to aesthetics and the discussion of the

cultural importance of such artistic personalities as Michelangelo and Rodin. As

Jürgen Habermas points out in his preface to this work, the fact that the volume

was republished more than half a century after its original date of publication

could be read as symptomatic of the fact that Simmel’s critical thinking on culture

feels at the same time both so close and so distant to us.

Simmel, Georg: Gesammelte Schriften zur Religonssoziologie [Collected Writings

on the Sociology of Religion]. (Hrsg. von Horst Jürgen Helle.) Berlin: Duncker &

Humblot, 1989.

The collection includes practically all that Simmel wrote and published on

religion: ten essays originally published between 1898 and 1918 as well as his only

monograph on the topic, Religion (1912; earlier version 1906). In contrast to Max

Weber and Emile Durkheim, who are famous for their treatment of religious

social formations, doctrines and their historical evolution, Simmel was interested

above all in the specific spiritual attitude or perspective typical of a religious

person. Faithful to his dialectic between the form and content of social

phenomena, Simmel made a distinction between religion as an institution and

religiosity. He distinguished a wide variety of contents in the form of religious

experiences. An objectified religion can become the object of scientific analysis.

Religion as created in the interaction of believers was to him the primary aspect of

the sociology of religion, and not the written creed or the predispositions of the

pious person.

Simmel, Georg: Individualismus der modernen Zeit – und andere soziologische

Abhandlungen. Ausgewählt und mit einem Nachwort von Otthein Rammstedt

[Individuality of the Modern Times – And Other Sociological Articles. Selected

and with an Afterword by Otthein Rammstedt]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008a, 394

p.

This is a collection of Simmel’s sociological writings compiled by one of the

leading German Simmel scholars, Otthein Rammstedt. Rammstedt has also

written a long afterword to the collection in which he discusses how Simmel’s

Appendix 11

understanding of sociology developed under his academic career. All the

contributions included in the book have also been published in the various

volumes of the GSG series. What makes this collection especially useful besides

the informative afterword is that Rammstedt has both selected and placed under

their proper headings the writings which in his mind best embody and exemplify

Simmel’s sociological thinking. Consequently, the selected writings are divided,

following Simmel’s own view which he expresses in the book Grundfragen der

Soziologie, under three headings: general sociology, formal sociology and

philosophical sociology. Therefore the collection gives a good idea of what

Simmel understood by these different types of sociological analysis and why it was

important both to keep all in mind while at the same time recognizing their

specificity. General sociology dealt with the problem of the relation between the

individual and the social, formal sociology analysed the various forms of

association, and finally philosophical sociology treated the cultural consequences

of social development and the nature of the modern society. The collection also

includes two writings in which Simmel sought to programmatically define sociology

and also to spell out the originality of his take on it. The first article, ‘The problem

of sociology’, from the year 1894, lays out the theoretical foundation of Simmel’s

sociology by specifying the forms of association as its specific object of study,

which Simmel developed further and put into practice in Sociology. The second,

‘The field of sociology’, is from the year 1917 and is among his last published

writings.

Simmel, Georg: Jenseits der Schönheit. Schriften zur Ästhetik und

Kunstphilosophie. Ausgewählt und mit einem Nachwort von Ingo Meyer [Beyond

Beauty. Writings on Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art. Selected and with an

Afterword by Ingo Meyer]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008b, 437 p.

The book contains a collection of Simmel’s aesthetic and art-philosophical

writings, divided into three sections: Simmel’s texts on the aesthetic aspects of

lifeworld; programmatic writings on art; and, finally, life-philosophical texts on art.

Ingo Meyer’s informative afterword looks at the scarce reception of Simmel’s

aesthetic writings, their influence, key aspects, and contributions.

Simmel’s works in English translations

Simmel’s major works on sociology and philosophy have come out as English

translations remarkably late, in particular compared to other sociological classics,

like Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. It was not, however, that his work had

been completely unknown to an English-speaking readership prior to that. In fact,

several extracts from his larger works were published in English very early on,

starting in 1893, so that by the 1910s no other European sociologist had more


pieces translated into English than Simmel. The texts (13 in all) also reached a

broad audience. Their wide dissemination was guaranteed by the fact that the

majority of them were published in the American Journal of Sociology as

translations by Albion Small, the founder and first ever editor-in-chief of the

journal. However, after 1910s this flood of translations dried up almost entirely,

and it was only in 1950, with the publication of the volume The Sociology of

Georg Simmel edited by Kurt H. Wolff that it was revitalized. The persistent

image in the English-speaking world of Simmel’s work as unsystematic, essayistic,

impressionistic, and fragmentary is largely due to the scarce availability of his

works in translation. While each generation reads and interprets its classics in its

own way, this has been especially characteristic of the reception of Simmel’s work.

The publication history was determined from his early American reception as a

sociologist of small group studies and social conflict to his later reception as a

cultural-critical analyst of modernity, an interpretation to a great extent initiated by

David Frisby in the 1980s. More recently, the new wave of scholarship has

discovered Simmel as a philosopher of life and a refined aesthete.

Monographs

Until late 1970s, not a single one of Simmel’s books had been made available in

English. The Problems of the Philosophy of History was the first when it came out

in 1977, and it was followed by The Philosophy of Money the next year. After

that, only five others have seen daylight: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,

Rembrandt, Kant and Goethe, Sociology, and The View of Life. With the

publication of Simmel’s major sociological works in English it has become

possible for an English-speaking readership to gain a more comprehensive picture

of his thinking and assess his overall contribution to the methodology and

epistemology of sociology.

Simmel, Georg: The Problems of the Philosophy of History. Translated and

edited with an introduction by Guy Oakes. New York, The Free Press, 1977, 220

p. (GSG 9.)

The book is the only one of Simmel’s early works, originally published in 1892,

which he republished later. It came in in 1905/1907 in revised form. The book is

an epistemological study, in which Simmel extends Kant’s idea of form as an a

priory precondition of knowledge to the study of history. Simmel acknowledges

that in the first edition of the book, the basic problematic which was to form the

backbone the second edition was not yet entirely clear to him. The book can be

read as a critique of a realist conception of history. Simmel opposed the ‘naïve’

realist conception typical of the historicism of his time, which assumed to be able

to describe the past as it really was, without the need for any mediating theoretical

Appendix 13

concepts. For Simmel, by contrast, the knowing subject has a constitutive role in

the production of historical knowledge. Historical knowledge can never be a sheer

copy or projection of the past but, analogous to the study of nature, it is dependent

on certain a priories of our experience. Accordingly, in the book Simmel advances

a thesis of history as a constitutive form and asks, how does the mere event of a

phenomenon become a historical fact. Simmel conceives of history as a form into

which the knowing subject orders singular events. History does not consist of

events as such in themselves, but they are located ‘below’ history, as it were. To

become history, events need to be ordered into a sequential order by the creative

active knowing subject. In the excursus ‘How is society possible?’ to his later work

Sociology, Simmel took up the idea of the a priories of knowledge again and

applied it to the constitution of society.

Simmel, Georg: The Philosophy of Money (Philosophie des Geldes). 1st edition

by David Frisby and Tom Bottomore in 1978; 2nd

edition 2011 by Frisby and

Charles Lemert (Forward). London: Routledge, 582 p.

Many regard The Philosophy of Money as Simmel’s main sociological treatise and

a key to his sociological thinking and theory despite its topic, the social nature of

money, which is seemingly much more specific compared for instance to the more

general title of Sociology. These claims are mainly based on three key aspects of

The Philosophy of Money. First, the book gives an exemplary picture of Simmel’s

sociological method. Simmel’s method is strongly influenced by his reading of

Kantian aesthetics and by aesthetic modernism, and it is with good reason that it

could therefore be called aesthetic. Simmel selects or identifies individual cultural

and social phenomena, some of which are seemingly rather trivial and

unimportant, and interprets them by showing not only their inner ambivalences,

but also how they capture some essential features and tensions of life in the

modern society. Second, of all Simmel’s works The Philosophy of Money

embodies best his theoretical idea of sociology as a study of the forms of

association or social interaction. The exchange of commodities mediated by

money in a modern economy is to Simmel society sui generis, which brings home

the idea that the specific object of study of sociology are the relations of reciprocal

interdependence between individuals which constitute both the social formations

and the individuals as social beings. A modern society mediated by money is also

the best example of a mobile society in constant change, which is one of the

guiding principles in Simmel’s approach to the study of societies in general. Third,

the object of the book, money, is also a key to Simmel’s analyses of modern

culture and to his understanding of the fate of the individual in the objectified

culture and modern society. Money presents the purest form of tool and a general

medium of exchange which can realize any goal whatsoever. What is more, it both

liberates individuals from social bonds and creates new kinds of social

dependences.


The Philosophy of Money is divided into two parts, an analytic and a synthetic

one, akin to the famous Kantian division. The first part is an analysis of the

preconditions and social constitution of money. It includes Simmel’s general

theory of value, which is based on the idea of the reflexive distance between the

subject and object. The objects have no ‘objective’ value as such. They attain a

value only through the relation of valuation. Simmel’s value theory was influenced

by the Marginalist economic thinking of his times even though he never took any

explicit stance to it. Reminiscent of Marx in his theory of value, Simmel claims that

the objects of exchange take the form of an objective value only under generalized

exchange of goods. This value is separate from their subjective value, which is

created between the subjects and the objects of their desire, and is based both on

the desirability of the objects and on the effort needed to acquire them. Such value

is in each case unique and subjective and consequently not comparable with the

evaluations of others as such. Simmel does not discuss critically his reception of

Carl Menger and Karl Marx, but uses them rather freely. All in all, the theory of

value that he develops in the book is fairly eclectic; in it the constitution of

economic values is only a special case of a more general theory of value and

valuation.

The second, synthetic, part of the book deals with the social and cultural

consequences of the generalized use of money. It is arguably better known than

the first part and has had a strong impact on latter-day sociology and cultural

theories, most notably via Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried

Kracauer. The synthetic part is divided into three chapters, the first of which takes

up the problem of how money affects, both positively and negatively, the freedom

of the individual. The second chapter is more historical in nature and discusses,

among other things, how personal values or the value of the person has been

transformed into monetary equivalences making them exchangeable. Finally, the

third chapter analyses the impact of money and monetary relations on the style of

modern life. What makes money so decisive in transforming all social relations

and cultural values in a modern society can be summarized in its three most

typical characteristics: objectivity, quantification, and distance. Money is the

ultimate medium, which has the ability to realise all goals. The other side of the

coin is the disappearance of emotional involvement and the emphasis on the

intellect in our social relations. Simmel developed these ideas further in one of his

best-known essays, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, published in 1903, in which

the modern urban culture exemplifies what is typical of the modern culture in

general. Simmel’s and Max Weber’s viewpoints on modern culture bear many

similarities, for instance in that both emphasise its calculative and intellectual

nature. But whereas Weber saw the increasing rationalization of modern culture

and life as the – final – destiny of modern man, Simmel stressed, true to his idea

of the ambivalence of modernity, the dual nature of monetary relations. The

Philosophy of Money contains surprising and highly informative analyses of the

Appendix 15

impact of money on all kinds of social relations and mental states of modern

individuals which to Simmel offer a clue to the understanding of the ambivalences

of modern culture

The book includes a very useful and informative translators’ introduction.

Simmel, Georg: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Translated by Helmut Loiskandl,

Deena Weinstein and Michael Weinstein. Urbana and Chicago: University of

Illinois Press, 1991, 186 p.

Originally published in 1907, the book was Simmel’s first major engagement with

modern life-philosophy and in many ways importantly anticipates his own life-

philosophy. While being a tour de force analytic critique of the key ideas of

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the book also connects with Simmel’s philosophy of

culture in an interesting way. It situates the philosophies of the two thinkers in

relation to the preponderance of means over ends, which Simmel regards as a

characteristic of modern culture. While Schopenhauer's philosophy is for him the

absolute philosophical expression of the simultaneous desire for and loss of final

goals and definite values as the inner condition of modern individuals, Nietzsche

takes the world characterized by this ambiguity as his starting point. Nevertheless,

ultimately the book is no historical or systematic reconstruction of the

philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but Simmel likens his

philosophizing about them to an artistic portrait: rather than pursuing absolute

likeness, he selects, on the basis of his own interests, some leitmotivs of their work

and interprets them in the light of his own method and aims.

The book demonstrates well Simmel’s mode of thought, namely, his inclination to

operate with polarities and dualities, opposites and paradoxes. In the book,

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche stand as opposing pairs: whereas the first epitomizes

pessimism, the work of the latter is characterized by optimism. And, most

fascinatingly and eloquently, Simmel argues that the unlimited optimism of

Nietzsche stems from the very same source as Schopenhauer’s pessimism: from

the negation of any absolute goal or purpose outside life. As life is to find

everywhere nothing but itself as willing, the only way out of the unremitting

monotony of the rhythm of life and the pain of ennui for Schopenhauer is the

negation of life. Nietzsche, by contrast, finds redemption from the pessimism of a

life without meaning within life itself, as he sees in the drive towards more-life the

possibility of affirming life. Thereby, Nietzsche has a very different notion of life

compared to that of Schopenhauer. Instead of running in monotony, life is for

him a source of immense powers and potentials. For Simmel, Nietzsche’s

conception of life ultimately presents itself as a poetic and radical philosophical

expression of Darwin’s idea of evolution.

Besides life, another central theme in the book is that of the will. After situating


Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in cultural history in chapter 1 in the manner just

described, chapters 2–3 present a critique of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the

will, examining metaphysics as a cultural object and probing into its

presuppositions. Chapter 4 returns to Schopenhauer’s pessimism as a sentiment of

life that sustains metaphysical objectification. Chapter 5 examines Schopenhauer's

aesthetics and chapter 6 his moral and religious ideas as objectifications of his

pessimistic temperament. Then Simmel turns from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche,

with chapter 7 examining Nietzsche’s moral interpretation of life as an expression

of his optimism, and chapter 8 discussing Nietzsche's moral philosophy. The edge

of Simmel’s interpretation is the claim that Nietzsche is no immoralist; he does not

refute morals altogether, only the predominant Christian morality of altruism, self-

denial and humbleness that in Nietzsche’s view restrains life. For Simmel,

Nietzsche is above all a moral philosopher trying to reformulate morals. And in

his reading the core of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy is the ideal of nobility

(Vornehmheit), which is according to Simmel is completely opposed to the

levelling ethos of the money economy. He regards the Nietzschean moral

philosophy as a form of personalism, which Simmel distinguishes from both

egoism and eudaimonism. Nietzsche’s notion of nobility is according to Simmel a

personal ideal which nevertheless simultaneously presents itself as an objective

value, measured in the heightening of life in terms of more-life. For Nietzsche, life

carries its own irreducible ideal, the demand for more-life, for the heightening,

progress, strengthening of life itself. This is one significant source out of which

Simmel was later to develop his concept of the ‘individual law’.

The book includes a lengthy and very helpful introduction by the translators,

which not only explicates Simmel’s reading of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and

his discursive strategies in an informative manner, but also addresses his project

more broadly and looks at its reception.

Simmel, Georg: Rembrandt. An Essay in the Philosophy of Art. Translated and

edited by Alan Scott and Helmut Staubmann. New York and London: Routledge,

2005, 177 p.

The book is a magisterial philosophical interpretation of Rembrandt’s art, which

means that it is not the historical contextualization of the artworks that it seeks, nor

does it focus on their technical or aesthetic aspects, but it lays emphasis on the

meaning and significance of the works. What intrigues Simmel in Rembrandt is

above all the impulse of movement that for Simmel forms the basis of

Rembrandt’s art. The aim of the book is, in the last instance, to give a

philosophical expression to this impulse of movement in terms of life. In Simmel's

view all great art manifests the unity of life and form. However, whereas in classical

art the only purpose of life seems to be to bring out form, for Rembrandt a form is

only an accidental expression and moment of life. It is especially in the light of an

anti-mechanistic notion of life as dynamic becoming that Simmel interprets

Appendix 17

Rembrandt’s art. In Simmel’s words, life ‘never is; it is always becoming’.

In the book, Simmel also explicitly distances himself from the idea of quantitative

individuality developed in his earlier sociological texts. The second chapter deals

with the question of the individual and its opposite, the general form shared by

many. Simmel suggests that whereas Renaissance portraits express typicality by

focusing on a character, Rembrandt’s portraits create the impression of

individuality. For such individuality, the sociological individuality that relies on

difference vis-à-vis others is completely irrelevant. Rembrandt’s portraits rather

present individuated life and embody the individual law. According to Simmel,

individuality is life’s form of reality; everywhere life appears as individuated. In the

chapter, Simmel also discusses the intimate relationship between individuality and

death. The type does not die, only the individual. The unique is irreplaceable and

unrepeatable; it is just as this unique life-process that the individual is singular.

However, Simmel suggests that the death that casts its shadow out of Rembrandt's

portraits is merely a symptom of how the principle of life is inextricably connected

to individuality in his art. Chapter 3 discusses religious art. In it Simmel makes a

conceptual distinction familiar from his essays on religion, namely that between

the objectivity of religion and religion as an inner experience. He suggests that all

Rembrandt's religious works focus on the religious person, not on the objective

form of religion. The chapter also contains a fascinating excursus, ‘What Do We

See in a Work of Art’, voicing some of the fundamental ideas of Simmel's

philosophy of art. By way of conclusion, Simmel discusses the capacities to create

and to give a form. According to him, every human action and achievement,

beyond pure imitation, involves both aspects. Anticipating some of Heidegger’s

subsequent views, Simmel argues that what makes us historical beings is the

peculiar combination of creativity and inheritance: we never create the new as

such, but in everything that we create there is an element of something handed

down to us.

The book also includes the translators’ helpful introduction, where they bring out

the distinctive features of Simmel’s philosophy of art in relation to sociologies of

art and art historical studies and situate the book in his oeuvre.

Simmel, Georg: Kant and Goethe. On the History of the Modern

Weltanschauung. Translated by Joseph Bleicher. In Theory, Culture & Society,

2007, 24(6): pp. 159–191.

Originally published in German as a small book in 1906, the text pits Kant and

Goethe against one another. In it, the contrast between the two represents a

conflict not only between two individual personalities or strands of thought, but

ultimately between two epochs. Simmel discusses Kant as an advocate of

mechanistic thought, characteristic of the late Renaissance. In the Renaissance,

mechanism appears as the decisive form of existence: unlike assumed by previous


epochs, knowing the world no longer amounted to revealing logically binding

concepts and the metaphysical eternity of substances, but to calculating laws of

motions governed by causality. Accordingly, events were perceived in terms of the

to-and-fro of matter and energy determined by laws of nature. Simmel suggests

that even though Kant conceived the external world as a representation within the

representing, he nevertheless considered the world in terms of mechanical

movement. Goethe’s work, by contrast, manifests for Simmel organicism. Goethe

perceives both nature and human soul as emerging from life. He regards both as

manifestations of the unity of being – with nature as its external dimension and the

human soul as the internal one. In their conception of nature we find another

polarity. While for Kant nature is a representation within the human soul, Goethe

renders the principle of life apparent in nature also the principle of the human

soul. Despite his seeming bias toward the principle of life and thus toward Goethe,

Simmel nevertheless ultimately refuses to choose from Kant and Goethe either

one or the other. On the contrary, he draws a shifting balance between the two by

discussing their standpoints in infinite reciprocity. In his closing remarks to the

text, Simmel notes that while the worldview of the epoch coming to a close could

be characterized by the slogan ‘Kant or Goethe!’, in the take on the issue of

mechanistic and organicist perspectives, the coming epoch may appear under the

sign of ‘Kant and Goethe’.

Simmel, Georg: Sociology. Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms.

Translated and edited by Anthoni J. Blazi and Mathew Kanjirathinkal, with an

introduction by Horst J. Helle. Leyden, Brill, 2009, 330 + 364 p.

Simmel’s Sociology appeared in 1908 and is generally regarded as one of his

major works, if not the major work. The book starts with the programmatic

chapter, ‘The Problem of Sociology’, which had been published in several

languages in the 1890s and continues with the equally famous treatise, ‘How is

Society possible?’ In these two writings Simmel lays out the foundation of his

programme of the analysis of society as a study of the social forms of association

based on the distinction between the form and content of social phenomena as

well as his famous three a priories of society and social knowledge. As a

sociologist, Simmel was interested more in social processes than in reified social

formations. He understands society, too, in terms of reciprocal relations between

individuals, thereby reverting the conventional view: instead of examining how

social relations take place in society, he insists that sociology should study how

society is produced in and by concrete relations between people. Though being

analogous to Kant's question of the preconditions of our comprehension of the

world of nature, the problem of the possibility of society that Simmel asks has an

entirely different methodological sense. Unlike nature, society is constituted from

within, by its elements themselves. To simplify a bit and to replace Simmel's

original terminology, the three a priories could be called ‘role’, ‘individuality’ and

‘structure’. The first a priori follows from the fact that we typify other actors, since

Appendix 19

it is impossible to know them completely or to characterize them as an object with

fixed properties. According to the second a priori, life is not completely social.

That is, each human being is at once social and non-social. No individual can be

reduced to their social roles but has a unique identity not based only on the

particular combination of his or her social roles. And, finally, an ideal society

would be one in which each individual finds a social position or a vocation in

which they can best realize their unique capabilities and features of their

personality. A constant play and counter-play of the social roles allocated to the

individuals takes plays in an open society. With these a priories Simmel had a

definitive impact on Georg Herbert Mead’s conception of the formation of social

identity as well as on Robert Merton’s theory of social roles. Ultimately, Sociology

presents a wide variety of subjects of sociological analysis and thematic

conceptualization, including the quantitative determination of the group, secrecy,

space, senses, super -and subordination, faithfulness and gratitude as well as

conflict.

Simmel, Georg: The View of Life. Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal

Aphorisms. Translated by John A. Y Andrews and Donald N. Levine. Chicago:

The University of Chicago Press, 2010, 203 p.

This book, which Simmel regarded as his ‘philosophical testament’, was published

in German three weeks after his death in 1918. The original German title,

Lebensanschauung, verbatim ‘lifeview’, is a modification of Wilhelm Dilthey's

concept of 'worldview' (Weltanschauung). The title needs to be understood in the

most literal sense: instead of presenting Simmel’s personal view of life, for instance

of good and happy life, or investigating specific contents of life, the book sets out

to view life itself, that is, not only the life of the individual, but life itself, life as an

incessant, continuous flux. The book has four chapters, three of which had

appeared earlier in the journal Logos. The first chapter, ‘Life as Transcendence’,

that makes its first appearance in the book, though for the volume Simmel also

revised chapters 3 and 4 so significantly that he insisted that they should be seen as

new works, and he also extended chapter 2.

The first chapter is the essential link between the others in that it lays out the

foundations of Simmel's original life-philosophy on which the ideas presented in

the subsequent chapters are built. Ultimately, Simmel understands life in terms of

self-transcendence. The key to his life-philosophy lies therefore in the notion of

'boundary' (Grenze) and in the opposition of life and form. Notwithstanding

Simmel's aim announced also by the title of the book, he rejects the very

possibility of experiencing and knowing life as such, purely as life. As a flux of

becoming, life is the opposite of form, but it is only ever manifest in some form.

Form thus presents a boundary which is indispensable for life, and yet every single

boundary can be stepped over. Accordingly, Simmel remarks that humans are

boundary beings who have no boundaries. In the chapter, he considers the


opposition between life and form in terms of more-life and more-than-life. With

the two notions, he not only makes a distinction between physiological or organic

life, on the one hand, and mental or cultural life, on the other, but also tries to

bring the two together into a unified view.

Chapter 2, ‘The Turn toward Ideas’, focuses on the process through which the

cultural forms created by us humans tend to detach themselves from our vital

needs and become autonomous, gain a life of their own, as it were. In result,

instead of forms serving life, life begins to serve forms. Simmel calls this process

the ‘turn of the axis of life’ (Achsendrehung des Lebens). As his examples, he

takes science, art, religion and justice and discusses how the process is observable

in them.

In chapter 3, ‘Death and Immortality’, Simmel examines death as a phenomenon

of life. Death is a boundary of life still part of life: instead of befalling us as if from

outside in our last instant, death accompanies life from the very start. In each and

every moment we are of the kind that we shall die, Simmel asserts. Heidegger’s

subsequent and famous existential-ontological interpretation of dying in Being and

Time bears remarkable resemblance with Simmel's metaphysics of death

presented in the chapter.

Finally, chapter 4, ‘The Law of the Individual’, develops a doctrine of vitalized and

individualized ethics. With the notion of individual law, which he quite probably

appropriated from Schleiermacher, Simmel seeks to dissolve the unity of law and

generality proposed by Kantian ethics. According to Simmel, the law of the

individual is valid not because it would hold for each and everyone, but because it

holds particularly for a specific individual. The law of the individual is a moral

‘ought’, which stems from the life-process and the idea of the self-realization of the

individual. In Appendix, the English translation includes a compilation of

Simmel's aphorisms and his notes from a folder with the title ‘Metaphysics’ found

from his literary remains. The aphorisms had been compiled by Gertrud

Kantorowicz, Simmel’s trusted student, close friend, and secret lover, and

published in Logos the year following his death (also appearing in GSG 20). The

book also includes an introduction by Donald N. Levine and Daniel Silver, where

the authors explicate the significance of The View of Life and situate it within the

context of Simmel’s oeuvre.

Edited volumes

The first collections of Simmel’s works in English were edited by Kurt H. Wolff.

The Sociology of Georg Simmel, published in 1950, includes for example the only

Appendix 21

available translation of Simmel's programmatic book Grundfragen der Soziologie

(‘Basic Problems of Sociology’). The second collection edited by Wolff, Georg

Simmel, 1958-1918, includes a number of commentaries and translations of

Simmel’s own essays as well as two early bibliographies, one of writings on Simmel

and the other of Simmel’s books in German and his writings available in English.

The volume Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms edited by David N.

Levine presents a broad selection of essays and excerpts, mainly from The

Philosophy of Money and Sociology, plus a couple of writings from Simmel’s later

life-philosophy. All of the more contemporary collections have a somewhat more

specific focus: On Women, Sexuality, and Love introduces the reader to Simmel’s

writings on gender relations and sexuality; the volume Simmel on Culture edited

by Frisby and Featherstone concentrates on Simmel’s writings on culture; and

Essays on Religion presents him as a sociologist of religion, which is a relatively

little known side of Simmel’s thinking.

Wolff, Kurt H. (ed.): The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: The Free

Press, 1950, 445 p.

This is an early translation of two of Simmel’s major works on sociology into

English. It covers most parts of Sociology as well as the book Grundfragen der

Soziologie (‘Basic Problems of Sociology’), published in 1917, which is Simmel’s

late presentation of his sociology and in which he introduced his influential

interpretation of the three different types of sociological questioning: general,

formal and philosophical sociology. General sociology deals with the quantitative

and qualitative aspects of the relation of the individual with the other members of

his or her group as well as the consequences of social differentiation. Formal

sociology introduces the conceptually and methodically crucial division between

social forms and their contents, thus uncovering a specific layer of reality, the

social one. Finally, philosophical sociology deals with epistemological and

metaphysical aspects of society, such as the fundamental problems of individuality

and humanity, mainly by way of analysing different philosophical and ethical

solutions to them, from egoism and classical individualism to socialism. The

chapter on formal sociology consists of Simmel’s essay on sociability, Sociability

was to Simmel an ideal example of social forms since it presents a pure social form

whose contents are not distinct from it. For Simmel, sociability is an example of

such self-purposive social interaction which includes its own purpose and thus

comes close to Immanuel Kant’s idea of the ‘form of purposiveness without a

purpose’, which in Kant’s thinking separates pure aesthetic taste from sensual

expressions of taste in the appreciation of the works of art. The idea shows the

debt of Simmel’s sociology to Kant’s philosophical aesthetics. Kurt H. Wolff

provided the book with a long and instructive introduction both interpreting

Simmel’s sociology and discussing the publication and availability of his writings.


Wolff, Kurt H.: Georg Simmel, 1958-1918. Columbus: The Ohio State University

Press, 1959, 396 p.

This collection includes a small selection of Simmel’s own writings, including two

programmatic articles on the nature and object of sociology, ‘The Problem of

Sociology’ and ‘How is society possible?’. It also contains commentaries on

Simmel’s work with a wide range of topics and interests, among them some classic

interpretations of his sociology, like F. H. Tenbruck’s piece ‘Formal sociology’,

Donald N. Levine’s ‘The structure of Simmel’s social thought’ and Rudolph H.

Weingartner’s ‘Form and content in Simmel’s philosophy of life’. The volume

also introduces the English translation of Gertrud Kantorowicz’s preface to

Simmel’s Fragmente und Aufsätze aus dem Nachlaß und Veröffentlichungen der

letzten Jahre (‘Fragments and Essays: Posthumous Essays and Publications of His

last Years’) edited by her and published in 1923. The collection was the first

attempt to collect and publish Simmel’s collected works posthumously.

Masamicha Shimmei’s article ‘Georg Simmel’s influence on Japanese thought’ is

also worth mentioning as a reminder that Simmel’s intellectual influence extends

beyond Europe and the US.

Levine, Donald N. (ed.): Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971, 395 p.

The book starts with a section on Simmel’s programmatic writings on sociology,

and it continues with selections on the forms of social interaction, social types, the

forms of individuality and the relation between the individuality and social

structure. The essays ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ and ‘Fashion’ are among

the best known in contemporary sociology. The metropolis essay is in many ways,

in addition to the second, synthetic part of The Philosophy of Money, a key to

Simmel’s understanding of modern culture and modernity. The essay on fashion

is an absolute classic in the sociology of fashion. Fashion is to Simmel a metaphor

of modernity and it also offers a prime example of what he means by social forms

being aesthetic by nature. The primary forces of the self-reproducing fashion

cycles are the parallel human needs of distinguishing oneself from others and of

being a part of a bigger social whole. The volume also contains a translation of

Simmel’s essay ‘Soziologie der Geselligkeit’ based on his opening lecture at the

first conference of the German Sociological Association held in 1910 in Frankfurt

(and later included in Grudnfragen der Soziologie in a slightly reworked form).

The essay presents Simmel’s take on sociology in a nutshell: sociability is for

Simmel a pure form of association, the form of forms, which is self-purposive in

that it does not serve any purpose other than itself.

Simmel, Georg: On Women, Sexuality, and Love. Translated with an introduction

by Guy Oakes. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984, 194 p.

Simmel, just like many of his academic contemporaries, was interested in the

‘women’s question’, actualized by the emerging women’s movement of his days.

Appendix 23

The four writings included in this collection, the last of which, 'On love', was

published posthumously, are all directly related to the main concerns of Simmel's

sociological and philosophical thinking, namely the question of the relation

between the subjective and objective culture. According to Simmel, there is an

essential connection between the process of objectification and the male character

or masculinity. Objective culture is the product of male activity characterized by

the division of labour and specialization. Simmel who was inclined to believe in a

timeless female essence thought that women’s life world, confined to the limits of

the household, is more personal, uniform, integrated, self- contained and also

more inclined to spontaneous expressions of emotions, effectively resisted

objectification or is only partially objectifiable. Even though SImmel did not give a

decisive answer to the question whether we could expect feminism to create a

qualitatively new kind of culture or a counterculture to the male dominated culture

he was inclined to think that feminism faced the principal problem of the male

dominant objective culture and that the contributions of women to it were not

valued to the equal extent as those of men. The last essay in the collection on

flirtation is famous and in many ways exemplifies Simmel’s intellectual style of

writing and argumentation. Flirtation is an experience that intersects with

femininity, sexuality, and play. Typical of Simmel, he draws parallels between

domains usually seen as disconnected from each other and extends flirtation

beyond etiquette to politics and intellectual performance.

Frisby, David and Featherstone, Mike (eds.): Simmel on Culture. Selected

writings. London: Sage, 1997, 302 p.

This is a comprehensive volume of Simmel’s writings on culture, in a broad sense

of the term, which contains both translations published earlier and several new

ones, many of which are today widely referred to. The essays and writings cover a

great variety of related themes, classified under nine topics, from Simmel’s more

general writings on the concept of culture and its fate in the modern society to his

analyses of more specific topics such as adornment, style, the Alpine journey and

the bridge and the door. David Frisby’s informative introduction places Simmel’s

writings into a wider context.

Simmel, Georg: Essays on Religion. Edited and translated by Horst Jürgen Helle

in collaboration with Ludwig Nieder. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997,

223 p.

The collection of translations is almost identical to the German collection

Gesammelte Schriften zur Religonssoziologie published in 1989 and also edited by

Helle. Before the publication of this collection of translations, Simmel’s ideas on

religion were almost unknown to the English-speaking readership.


Secondary literature

Despite exerting a considerable influence in his lifetime both in Europe and in

North America, soon after his death Simmel's legacy was forgotten almost

completely, at least by name. It was only in the 1950s that his work began to

receive more interest again. The revived interest owed much to the edited volumes

by Kurt H. Wolff, and not only in North America, but it was from across the

Atlantic that Simmel was brought back even to Germany (though the efforts of

Kurt Gassen and Michael Landmann were without doubt significant as well in

raising new interest in Simmel in Germany). Whereas the – admittedly rather

scarce – post-war North American scholarship on Simmel focused especially on

his studies of small groups and conflict, more recently Anglophone commentaries

on Simmel’s work have not only become much more numerous, but also broader

in scope. This is largely due to the contributions of David Frisby and Donald N.

Levine, who introduced Simmel as a much more versatile thinker than how he was

perceived until then. Whereas at the highpoint of postmodernism in the 1980s

and 1990s, Simmel was received as a theorist of modernity and postmodernity and

as a cultural critic, in the new millennium the new wave of Simmel scholarship has

emphasized especially the life-philosophical or trans-sociological aspects of his

work.

Monographs on Simmel in German

In Germany, the reception history of Simmel’s work is over one hundred years

long. Nevertheless, it was only in the 1970s and 1980s that a real Simmel

renaissance began, with several monographs on his work published around that

time. Here, we give a small selection of them as well as introduce a few more

recent studies. Peter Ernst Schnabel’s Die soziologische Gesamtkonzeption Georg

Simmels, Heinz-Jürgen Dahme’s Soziologie als Exakte Wissenschaft, and Sibylle

Hübner-Funk’s Georg Simmels Konzeption von Gesellsch present a systematic

interpretation of Simmel’s sociological thought. In her monograph, Petra Christian

analyses Hegel’s influence on Simmel’s sociological and philosophical thought.

Dynamik der Formen bei Georg Simmel by Antonius M. Bevers emphasises the

theoretical unity of Simmel’s work and the centrality of his distinction between

form and content as well as the concept of Wechselwirkung. Klaus Lichtblau’s

Georg Simmel is a concise introduction to Simmel’s thinking, whereas Klaus

Christian Köhnke’s Der Junge Simmel presents a detailed intellectual biography of

Simmel during the formative years of his thinking. Gregor Fitzi’s monograph

Soziale Erfahrung und Lebensphilosophie reconstructs Simmel’s intellectual

Appendix 25

relation to Henri Bergson and, lastly, Claudius Härpfer demonstrates Simmel’s

contribution to the emergence of sociology in Germany.

Schnabel, Peter-Ernst: Die soziologische Gesamtkonzeption Georg Simmels. Ein

wissenschaftshistorische und wissenschaftstheoretische Untersuchung [Georg

Simmel’s Overall Conception of Sociology. A historical and theoretical Treatise of

Scientific Inquiry]. Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer, 1974, 235 p.

In the book, Schnabel seeks a rehabilitation of Simmel as a sociologist engaged

with fundamental questions of scientific inquiry. The structure of the book is

twofold. In Part I, the author formulates a critique of the history of sociology with

special reference to Simmel. Parts II and III present an analysis of Simmel

scholarship and its often stereotypical understanding of the history of sociology. By

examining the reception of Simmel's work, Schnabel aspires, on the one hand, to

demonstrate the limitations and consequences of an uncritical conception of

history and, on the other hand, to give Simmel scholarship a new impetus by

transcending these limitations. He shows how Simmel reception has typically been

divided into two separate traditions: Anglo-American and German. According to

Schnabel, the Anglo-American tradition has, from the outset, characteristically

centred on the operationability of Simmel’s theses and on his theory fragments of

particular bits and pieces of social reality. At the time Schnabel wrote his book,

only the most recent Anglo-American reception had begun to pay attention to the

presuppositions of Simmel’s work. Of the German reception tradition the exact

opposite holds. According to Schnabel, it is characterized by a more philological

and historicist approach, focusing on situating Simmel’s work within the context of

the time it was written rather than on the usability of his theses. It was only the

most recent German scholarship that had begun to use his ideas as theoretical

tools.

Christian, Petra: Einheit und Zwiespalt. Zum hegelianisierenden Denken in der

Philosophie und Soziologie Georg Simmels [Unity and Opposition. On the

Hegelianized Aspects of Georg Simmel's Philosophy and Sociology]. Berlin:

Duncker & Humblot, 1978, 158 p.

The book looks into the influence of Hegel on Simmel's thought while, at the

same time, documenting the renewed interest in Hegel in Germany during the first

decades of the 20th century. In her interpretation, Christian lays special emphasis

on the notions of ‘life’ and Wechselwirkung, reciprocal effect. She argues for the

interconnectedness of Simmel's sociology and metaphysics, apparent for instance

in how the notion of Wechselwirkung, serving initially as a sociological concept,

grows in his work into a broad metaphysical principle that concerns the whole of

reality. In the book, Christian also interestingly traces the pre-Simmelian history of

the concept of Wechselwirkung, as a path leading from Kant to Hegel and via

Schleiermacher and Dilthey eventually to Simmel. What is also fascinating in her

take on Simmel is the way how she sees the content and form of Simmel’s own


thought as one: she argues that both language and thinking are for Simmel

something ‘living’, not systems of meanings and propositions.

Dahme, Heinz-Jürgen: Soziologie als Exakte Wissenschaft. Georg Simmels Ansatz

und seine Bedeutung in der gegenwärtige Soziologie. I & II Simmel's Soziologie in

Grundriß. [Sociology as an Exact Science. Georg Simmel’s Contribution and and

Significance in Stuttgart: Enke, 1981.

Dahme’s comprehensive two-volume book examines, on the one hand, the

reception and contemporary relevance of Simmel’s work and, on the other, the

foundation that it provides for sociology. As also its title hints, Dahme suggests that

in his work Simmel develops a much more systematic conception of sociology

than is usually thought: Simmel sought to define and legitimize sociology as an

exact science.

Hübner-Funk, Sibylle: Georg Simmels Konzeption von Gesellschaft. Ein Beitrag

zum Verhältnis von Soziologie, Äesthetik und Politik [Georg Simmel's Conception

of Society. A Contribution to the Relation of Sociology, Aesthetics and Politics].

Köln: Pahl-Rugstein, 1982, 94 p.

In this concise book, Hübner-Funk sets as her aim to crystallize Simmel’s notion

of society from his sociological and philosophical writings. She suggests that

Simmel’s worldview is marked by delicate relations between sociology, aesthetics

and politics, and argues that it is only by looking through his theory of society that

those relations become perceptible. The author lays special emphasis on the

presence and significance of aesthetics in Simmel’s sociology. She argues that,

considering that Simmel’s contributions to modern sociology have remarkable

potential, their aesthetics components are not outdated but stand in an intimate

relationship with the methodology of building sociological theory, especially with

the interactionist strand. As somewhat symptomatic of the original date of

publication of the book (it originally came out as a sociological diploma work in

1968), the author presents it as ultimately a ‘critique of ideology’, tracing not only

the ties and repercussions of Simmel’s specification of the sociological method,

but also its practico-political consequences.

Bevers, A. M.: Dynamik der Formen bei Georg Simmel. Ein Studie über die

methodische und theoretische Einheit eines Gesamtwerkes [The Dynamic of

Forms in Georg Simmel. A Study on the Methodical and Theoretical Unity of an

Oeuvre]. Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1985, 184 p.

The book, originally published as a PhD thesis, tries to reconstruct the

methodological and theoretical unity of Simmel’s work. Bevers argues that

Simmel’s epistemology, sociology and life-philosophy conflate in two themes that

run throughout his oeuvre: the distinction between form and content and the

principle of Wechselwirkung, reciprocal effect. Bevers shows how in Simmel's

Appendix 27

epistemology the distinction between form and content appears as a logical

principle (i.e., embodied in the a priori forms of knowledge); in his sociology as a

methodological principle (i.e., forms of Vergesellschaftung, association); and,

finally, in the philosophy of culture and life as a metaphysical principle (i.e., the

opposition of life and form). According to Bevers, the principle of reciprocal

effect, in turn, manifests itself in Simmel’s epistemology in the form of

epistemological relationism as the relative character of knowledge and truth. In

Simmel’s sociology, it figures as his sociological relationism, which stresses the

functional character of social reality. Lastly, in his philosophy of culture/life, the

principle is manifest in the form of metaphysical relationism, expressed in the

dialectical character of life and cultural process. For Bevers, Simmel's work

presents itself above all as an attempt to bring Kantianism and life-philosophy into

unison. Accordingly, Bevers aims to show how Simmel ‘vitalizes Kantianism and

kantianizes vitalism’. Bevers’ book admittedly takes an important step towards a

comprehensive understanding of Simmel’s work, but it ignores or glosses over

some aspects of it, such as his theorizing on individuality, theory of value, and the

aesthetic aspect of his work, for instance.

Christian Köhnke: Der junge Simmel in Theoriebeziehungen und sozialen

Bewegungen [Young Simmel in his relations to theories and in social movements].

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996, 569 p.

Köhnke’s detailed and extensive intellectual biography of Simmel covers his

studies and academic achievements as well as intellectual development until the

mid-1890s. Among the many topics that it takes up are for instance the impact of

Simmel’s academic teachers’ Völkerspychologie on his thinking, Simmel’s relation

to the student movements of his times and the role of his Jewish origin in young

Simmel’s self-understanding. The book also gives an interesting interpretation and

detailed account of Simmel’s early major work on ethics, Einleitung in die

Moralwissenschaften. As Köhnke points out, writing an intellectual biography of

Simmel is especially challenging, if not nearly impossible, due to the extremely

scarce availability of Simmel's self-biographical notes and the almost total lack of

other first-hand biographical evidence or reports by his contemporaries. At a more

general level Köhnke’s work is guided by the question of the role played by

Simmel’s position as (partly) an academic outsider in the world of German

universities and by his oscillation between aesthetics, psychology, sociology and

philosophy in his contribution to the emergence of the new discipline of sociology,

which has given him the status as one of its founding fathers. As Köhnke sees it,

the development of Simmel’s thinking can be divided into three distinct periods

based on his understanding of the individual and the social whole. The way in

which Simmel conceived their relation had consequences for his understanding of

the nature of modernity, the relation of subjective and objective cultures, as well as

the ‘tragedy of culture’. In the first phase, Simmel was a positivist who believed in

the purely scientific solution of the questions, strongly under the influence of


Darwinism and Völkerpsychologie. He perceived the individual as an intersection

of different social circles in which a person participates. Simmel, however,

changed his position already in 1892 with the publication of The Problems of the

Philosophy of History. In the book, he paid attention to the creativity of the

subject and gradually started to recognize the legitimacy of understanding the

meaning of human action. The publication of The Philosophy of Money, arguably

Simmel’s first literary work as a genuinely independent thinker, is the highpoint of

this period. Finally, in the third period he developed the idea, analogous to art and

artistic creativity and leading to a new conception of philosophy, of the ‘individual

law’.

Lichtblau, Klaus: Georg Simmel. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag 1997, 182 p.

This is a very concise but comprehensive introduction to the whole of Simmel’s

oeuvre, starting from his early major sociological writings about social

differentiation and ending with his diagnosis of modernity and the fate of

individuality in the modern world. Whilst highlighting the rather radical changes in

Simmel’s orientation and interests from sociology to aesthetics and life-philosophy

of life that took place after the completion of The Philosophy of Money, the

author also emphasizes continuity in Simmel’s thinking. The fate of the subjective

spirit – or the soul – and the possibilities of genuine or ‘qualitative’ individuation in

a situation of increasing objectification of cultural values, which Simmel called the

tragedy of culture, remained his central concern throughout most of his academic

life. As Lichtblau understands it, Simmel was consequent in emphasizing that the

development of the money economy and the increasing differentiation of the

modern society both seriously restricted the freedom of the subjective spirit and

created new possibilities for its realization. In this way, the typical feature of

Simmel’s reasoning in terms of ‘both–and’ rather than ‘either– or’ which, despite

some obvious similarities, distinguishes his analysis of the modern culture from the

more one-dimensional conceptions of alienation often inspired by Marx.

Fitzi, Gregor: Soziale Erfahrung und Lebensphilosophie. Goerg Simmels

Beziehung zu Henri Bergson [Social Experience and Life-Philosophy: Georg

Simmel's Relation to Henri Bergson]. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz,

2002, 340 p.

The book is a fascinating and detailed reconstruction of the intellectual relation

between Simmel and Henri Bergson, beginning from its prehistory via the more

intensive communication phase ever till the conflict caused by war and eventually

to the end of their relation in Simmel’s decease. It is in particular with an eye on

the affinities and differences between Simmel’s life-philosophy and Bergson’s

vitalism that Fitzi interprets the relation. Importantly, Fitzi emphasizes the notion

of ‘boundary’ (Grenze) as the key to Simmel’s life-philosophy. Unlike for Bergson,

for Simmel, the impulse for the restless movement of life does not derive from life

Appendix 29

itself, from pure duration, but from the need to overcome its present form. Fitzi

also explicates the mutual relationship between Simmel’s sociology and his life-

philosophy by asserting the interconnectedness of social experience and life-

experience.

Härpfer, Claudius: Georg Simmel und die Entstehung der Soziologie. Eine netzweksoziologische Studie. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2014, 225 p.

The book is a sociological study into the history of sociology, with Simmel placed

in a central position. It shows how closely Simmel’s career was tied to the

emergence of sociology as a discipline in Germany and also discusses Simmel’s

contribution to its institutionalization. Interestingly, Härpfer not only examines

how Simmel’s work gave a significant impetus for network analysis, but he also

applies some of the tools of network analysis and bibliometrics to analyse the

networks to which Simmel belonged. In the study, Simmel emerges as an

intersection of several social circles, such as the one around the Völkerpsychologie

of Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, the one around Gustav Schmoller’s

seminar and Jahrbuch, the one around the journal Logos, and friendships with

Georg Jellinek, Heinrich Rickert, and Max Weber.

Edited volumes on Simmel in German

The volume Buch des Dankes an Georg Simme edited by Kurt Gassen and

Mchael Landmann that was published in 1958 commemorated Simmel’s 100th

anniversary and was an early attempt to revitalise his intellectual heritage. Hannes

Böhringer and Karlfried Gründer’s Ästhetik und Soziologie um die

Jahrhundertwende positions Simmel’s thinking in between aesthetics and sociology

at the turn of the 20th

Century. Simmel und die frühen Soziologen by Otthein

Rammstedt takes up Simmel’s relation to other classical sociologists. The volume

Georg Simmel und die Moderne edited by Heinz-Jürgen Dahme is an early

contribution to Simmel as a theorist of modernity, inspired by David Frisby’s

interpretations which came out in English at the same time. The collection Georg

Simmels Philosophie des Geldes edited by Jeff Kintzelé and Peter Scheide is a

relatively rare attempt to highlight various aspects of Simmel’s Philosophy of

Money, and Georg Simmels grosse ”Soziologie” edited by Hartmann Tyrell,

Rammstedt, and Ingo Meyer presents a wide range of interpretations of Simmel’s

Sociology.

Gassen, Kurt & Landmann, Michael (Hrg.): Buch des Dankens an Georg Simmel.

Briefe, Erinnerungen, Bibliographie. Zu seinem 100. Geburtstag am 1.März 1958.

Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1958 (2.Auflage 1993).


The book came out on the 100th

anniversary of Simmel’s birth in 1958. It was an

early, after-war attempt to revitalize his intellectual heritage. In addition to

Simmel’s own short and unfinished autobiography, Michael Landmann’s

biography of Simmel and a – rather incomplete – bibliography, it includes

Simmel’s letters to, for instance, Edmund Husserl, Heinrich Rickert, Rainer Maria

Rilke as well as Max and Marianne Weber. These are all, along with many more

letters, made available more recently in the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe. The

main and most valuable contests of this celebratory book consist of a compilation

of memoirs of a great number of Simmel’s friends and former students.

Böhringer, Hannes & Gründer, Karlfried (Hrg.): Ästhetik und Soziologie um die

Jahrhundertwende: Georg Simmel [Aesthetics and Sociology Around the Turn of

the Century: Georg Simmel]. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976,

281 p.

The first part of this volume consists of contributions to a seminar held in 1973 in

Köln. Each presentation, several of which have a quite personal flavour, is

followed by extracts from the discussions which followed the presentations. In the

first presentation Michael Landmann outlined the main features of Simmel’s

thinking. Sibylle Hübner-Funk took up the importance and impact of the aesthetic

elements in his sociological thinking. Her essay shows well how the works of in his

mind the greatest artists of his times played a special role in Simmel’s

understanding of life and modernity. Despite the title of the book, only a minority

of the essays gathered in it deal with the aesthetic dimensions of Simmel’s

thinking, but they take up various sociological themes and concepts. The original

contributions based on the presentations given at the meeting have been

complemented by a few others commissioned for this particular collection. The

last part of the book is more documentary and personal. It includes among others

Simmel’s two essays. The first is on Rodin and the other one is his short fairy tale

about colour. Simmel’s son Hans’s memoirs about his father nicely complete the

collection.

Dahme, Heinz-Jürgen & Rammstedt, Otthein (eds.): Georg Simmel und die

Moderne. Neue Interpetationen und Materialien [Georg Simmel and the Modern.

New Interpretations and Materials]. Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 1984, 486 p.

David Frisby’s long essay ‘Georg Simmel’s Theory of Modernity’ introduces this

very interesting collection of essays written by leading (mostly German) experts on

Simmel’s thought and writings. Despite being part of the revival of interest in

Simmel as a sociologist of modernity, the individual contributions vary a lot

thematically. They analyse, for instance, Simmel’s relation to Stefan Georg and

Friedrich Nietzche; the reception and sometimes even outright neglect of

Simmel’s sociology by some classical sociologists; the interpretations of Simmel’s

sociology as an aesthetic theory; the impact of aesthetics on his sociological

method; and the young Simmel’s interest in his academic teachers’

Appendix 31

Völkerpsychologie. From the several excellent essays one could mention in

particular Heinz-Jürgen Dahme’s discussion of the relation between sociology and

philosophy in Simmel’s self-understanding and self-positioning throughout his

academic career as well as Klaus Lichtblau’s path-breaking study of Simmel’s

reception of Nietzche’s idea of the pathos of distance and the centrality of the idea

of the noble or aristocracy of culture (Vornehmheit) in his problematization of the

modern individuality under the pressure of monetary relations which tend to level

out all genuine, qualitative differences.

Rammstedt, Otthein (Hrg.): Simmel und die frühen Soziologen. Nähe und

Distanz zu Durkheim, Tönnies und Max Weber [Simmel and the Early

Sociologists: Proximity and Distance to Durkheim, Tönnies and Max Weber].

Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1988, 347 p.

The contributions to this volume, written by several prominent experts on

Simmel, take up from different angles the question of Simmel’s relation to the

three other classics of sociology, Durkheim, Tönnies and Max Weber as well as

analyse their influence on one another. One of the interesting questions that

several of the authors take up is how, and to what extent, the first major works of

these classics in the new academic field, sociology, resemble each other in their

basic questions, methodological approach and development of concepts. They all

wrote and published their major contributions almost simultaneously at a time

when sociology did not yet have an established institutional disciplinary identity in

the academic world. Being primarily a sociologist was for them far from self-

evident and their intellectual activities and ambitions outstretched by far the limits

of any single academic discipline.

Kintzelé, Jeff & Schneider, Peter (eds.): Georg Simmels Philosophie des Geldes

[Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money]. Frankfurt: Anton Hein, 1993, 439 p.

This extensive collection of essays thematically centring on The Philosophy of

Money is divided into three parts. The essays included in the first part give a

general introduction to Simmel’s sociological writings, his cultural philosophy and

his theory of knowledge as well as discuss the place of The Philosophy of Money

in his oeuvre. The second and the third parts follow Simmel’s own basic

distinction between the analytic and synthetic part of his Philosophy of Money.

The second part takes up, for example, Simmel’s theory of value and, under

critical scrutiny, shows its shortcomings and the relevance of trust in money. The

last, third part discusses, for instance, whether Simmel was after all a theoretician

of alienation and examines his acclaimed cultural pessimism. The contributions

vary a lot as far as their closeness to Simmel’s thinking is concerned, some aiming

at an explication and problematization of some of his basic theoretical concepts,

while others interpret Simmel’s central ideas placing them in a more general

theoretical context using Simmel more as a fruitful starting point or as a point of

reference.


Tyrell, Hartmann & Rammstedt, Otthein & Meyer, Ingo (Hg.): Georg Simmels

grosse ”Soziologie”. Eine kritische Sichtung nach hundert Jahren [Georg Simmel’s

Big ’Sociology’: A Critical Examination after One Hundred Years]. Bilefeld:

transcript Verlag, 2011, 418 S.

A collection of essays based on papers presented in a seminar dedicated to the

centennial of Simmel’s Sociology in 2008. In addition to analysing special aspects

of Simmel’s sociology, such as the impact of quantity on social relations, social

competition, senses and religion, it takes up many important questions of the

genesis of Simmel’s big monograph on sociology, the constitution and the

structure of the work as well as its relation to Simmel’s other works. The volume

also highlights some of the core ideas of Simmel’s sociology as well as his relation

to some of his predecessors and contemporaries. The book includes also a

bibliographical note on the reception of Simmel’s work in the USA as well as

selected book reviews of Sociology published shortly after its appearance.

Monographs on Simmel in English

After a relatively late start, quite a few monographs examining various aspects of

Simmel’s sociological and philosophical work has seen daylight in English by now.

Nicholas Spykman’s The Social Theory of Georg Simmel, originally published in

1925, was the first monograph to appear on Simmel’s social theory in English.

Experience and Culture by Rudolph Weingartner is to this day the only

monograph on Simmel’s philosophy written in English, and Giancarlo Poggi’s

Money and the modern mind is the only comprehensive English monograph on

Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. David Frisby’s four influential treatises published

within less than ten years and included here re-discovered Simmel as a theorist of

modernity, emphasized his sociological impressionism as well as gave rise to a

renewal of interest in his sociological thought in the Anglophone world. Bryan S.

Green’s Literary Methods and Sociological Theory presented an original

application of literary methods to analysing the specific style of the writings of

Simmel and Weber. Georg Simmel and the American Prospect by Gary D.

Jaworski examines the American reception of Simmel’s work during the last

hundred years. The book Georg Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology by Ralph M.

Leck explores Simmel’s significance for German modernism and avant-garde

political movements. Nàtalia Cantó Milà’s A Sociological Theory of Value

presents a systematic analysis of Simmel’s sociological theory of value and his

relational method. The book Simmel and ‘the Social’ by Olli Pyyhtinen argues for

the importance and relevance of Simmel’s analysis of the fundamental questions

of social theory concerning the notion of the social. In their book Form and

Dialectic in Georg Simmel’s Sociology, Henry Schemer and David Jarry defend

Appendix 33

the position according to which Simmel was a systematic social theorist applying a

dialectical mode of thought. Finally, The Social Thought of Georg Simmel by

Horst Helle argues for the fruitfulness of Simmel’s method and concept of

interpretative sociology in studying the fundamental problems of our time.

Spykman, Nicholas J.: The Social Theory of Georg Simmel. (With an

Introduction by David Frisby.) New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2004,

291 p. Originally published in 1925 by The University of Chicago Press.)

The book is the first monograph ever published on Simmel's social theory in

English. In it, Spykman treats Simmel principally as a social philosopher, who was

not so much interested in conceptual abstractions as in understanding the socio-

historical world with its phenomena like art, money, economic value, morals,

aesthetics and religion. The monograph is divided into three parts, named

‘Books’. The first one deals with Simmel’s contributions to the methodology of

the social sciences in general and of sociology in particular. Besides discussing

Simmel’s epistemology of society and the key ideas and principles of his sociology

of forms, the section also demarcates sociology from the social sciences, social

psychology as well as from social philosophy and the philosophy of history. The

second part turns to the practical applications of Simmel’s sociology by focusing

on specific forms of association examined by Simmel: superordination and

subordination as well as conflict and struggle. The section also discusses Simmel’s

treatment of the quantitative determination of social forms, of the spatial aspects of

social relations, of social conservation, social differentiation and the relationship

between the individual and the group. The third part of the book, lastly, examines

Simmel’s social metaphysics. And it is by focusing on The Philosophy of Money

that Spykman illustrates it, thus disregarding the life-philosophy of Simmel’s

mature work. The section discusses the relation of money to individual liberty and

to the style of modern life. Interestingly, against the longstanding judgment of

Simmel's work as fragmentary, Spykman’s book already stressed the functional

unity of Simmel's writings. According to him, Simmel’s essays on the most diverse

subjects are bound together by a common mode of thought or method of

approach, namely relationalism. Notwithstanding its virtues, as David Frisby

remarks in his informative introduction to the book, Spykman's treatment of

Simmel’s social theory remains compartmentalized and somewhat circumscribed,

thereby failing to do justice to the remarkable breadth of Simmel’s work. More

subsequent studies of Simmel’s social theory haven taken into consideration also

those writings which Spykman compartmentalizes as ‘philosophical’.

Weingartner, Rudolph H.: Experience and Culture: The Philosophy of Georg

Simmel. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1960.

To this day, Weingrartner’s book is the only monograph on Simmel’s philosophy

written in English. Weingartner sets as the main aim of the book to reconstruct


Simmel’s philosophical position. The work is not, however, a historical

reconstruction trying to situate Simmel in relation to historical antecedents, but

Weingartner is far more interested in the key ideas and internal organization of

Simmel’s work. The author remarks that the exposition is synthetic in nature, as

Simmel himself nowhere defined and reflected on his philosophical position in as

explicit terms and in so many words. The book consists of three main chapters.

The first chapter sets out to reconstruct Simmel’s life-philosophy. Interestingly,

unlike what has been customary also in some of the more recent scholarship,

Weingartner does not search for it only from Simmel’s late works, but he makes

use of almost all his writings. The second chapter discusses Simmel’s philosophy

of history, and the third presents a detailed discussion of Simmel’s ideas about the

nature of philosophy itself. For Weingartner, Simmel’s philosophy is primarily

organized around the concepts of life and experience with an interest in concrete

and particular cultural phenomena. While putting forth an informed and

informative reading of Simmel’s philosophy, at times Weingartner exaggerates its

systematic nature, describing it in too rigid terms, even as a system of some kind.

Frisby, David: Sociological Impressionism. A Reassessment of Georg Simmel’s

Social Theory. London: Heinemann, 1981, 190 p.

With this work David Frisby, together with his introduction to the English

translation of The Philosophy of Money (1978), started his long and highly

influential career as a leading Simmel interpreter and mediator of his work to the

English-speaking world. As Frisby admits in his preface, the book covers only a

limited range of themes in Simmel’s work but these are central in interpreting

Simmel’s contribution to sociology and cultural philosophy. Frisby’s main interests

lay both in interpreting Simmel’s specific and original conception of sociology as a

particular perspective to reality as well as the specificity of his method which

reminds of aesthetics and which is reflected in the title of the book, Sociological

Impressionism, and exemplified by the figure of a flâneur, an anonymous

spectator or observer in the urban crowd. To Simmel, the sociologist is

reminiscent of the modern artist or painter, who sets as one's task to produce

snapshots sub specie aeternitatis, that is, catch the meaning of social life in its

fragments and fleeting moments. The book ends with a chapter on Simmel as a

‘philosopher of the times’, that is, as a diagnostician of modernity, a theme that

runs throughout Frisby’s whole Simmel reception later.

Frisby, David: Georg Simmel. London: Routledge, 1984 (Revised edition 2002),

161 p.

This is the best introduction to Simmel’s sociological thought published in English

which, despite being rather concise, is quite comprehensive. After briefly narrating

Simmel’s life and the context of his work, the author presents the development of

Simmel’s ideas about the specific nature of sociology, its differentia specifica

compared to the humanities and other disciplines as well as its method. After that

Appendix 35

Frisby systematically goes through Simmel’s three main sociological works, On

Social Differentiation, The Philosophy of Money and Sociology showing both

important continuities and disruptions in Simmel’s thinking. These highly

informative presentations are particularly useful in pointing out central themes and

topics in these works which often have given a rather arbitrary impression to their

occasional reader. This is true in particular about Simmel’s ‘big’ Sociology which

consists of at least seemingly rather arbitrary and not very well ordered or cohesive

chapters alternating between more theoretical treatises and essays or excursions on

a wide range of topics, from the question how society is possible to adornment and

the sociology of the senses. Frisby takes up under critical assessment several

previous suggestions of how best to make sense of the structure of the presentation

in the book as well as presents his own interpretation of it which is very useful.

The difficulty in making sense of the theoretical unity and guiding thread of

Sociology has been one of the reasons why the reception of Simmel’s sociological

thought has traditionally been quite selective and it has paid attention usually only

to some specific aspects of his work (e.g. Simmel as a sociologist of roles,

theoretician of small groups, conflict sociologist, network analyst, etc.) To the

second revised edition of the work the author added a new long preface which

takes up Simmel in particular as a theoretician and diagnostician of modernity, a

topic which has been central to Frisby’s interest in Simmel’s work and which he

has dealt with more thoroughly in his other works on Simmel.

Frisby, David: Fragments of Modernity. Theories of Modernity in the Works of

Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985, 319 p.

Frisby published several treatises, both in separate articles or as parts of larger

works, both in English and German, on Simmel’s theory of modernity. The

monograph Fragments of Modernity includes what could be regarded as Frisby’s

most comprehensive and developed presentation and interpretation of Simmel as

a theorist of modernity – modernity as an eternal present – and of Simmel's

method of study with its focus on the fragments of social experience which

captured, as if in a condensed form, the sense of modernity. Besides Simmel, the

book also discusses the work of two of Simmel’s followers and famous cultural

theorists and diagnosticians, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. As Frisby

shows, what these three highly original German thinkers and cultural critics

shared, in addition to some basic methodological concerns inspired by aesthetics

and cultural analysis of modernity, was an interest in capturing what was ‘new’ in a

modern society, what distinguished it from traditional societies and made it really

‘modern’. Following the example of Charles Baudelaire, the originator of the

concept or modernité, they all tried to capture the sense of the ‘transitory, fleeting

and arbitrary’ and what was specific in the experience of modernity in all its

ambiguities, including the ambivalences and tragic features of the modern culture.

More remarkably, whilst related to Max Weber’s idea of domination of

instrumental rationality or his theories of modernization, Simmel’s, Kracauer’s and


Benjamin's vision significantly differed from them. They all also shared a strong

interest in artistic and literary expressions of modernism, which strongly informed

their interpretation of modernity. And, as Frisby states, Simmel, Kracauer and

Benjamin all view modernity to some extent as strangers or outsiders, not fully

integrated into the academia.

Frisby, David: Simmel and Since. Essays on Georg Simmel’s Social Theory.

London: Routledge, 1992, 214 p.

This is a collection of Firsby’s articles, most of which had been published in

journals, reprinted in revised form here. They cover a wide range of topics but

their main focus is on social theory and on the theory of modernity in particular.

The book also takes up Simmel’s relation to the sociological analyses of his

predecessors and contemporaries Ferdinand Tönnies, Karl Marx and Max

Weber. The last chapter argues for the importance and actuality of Simmel’s

analyses of cultural phenomena, and it is interesting also in showing how the

Simmel revival in the 1980s, largely initiated by Frisby, was related to the debates

on postmodernity.

Green, Bryan S.: Literary Methods and Sociological Theory. Case Studies of

Simmel and Weber. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988, 303 p.

In this highly original work Green develops and tests the application of literary

methods to analysing the style of writing and rhetoric practice of sociological

theorizing by using Simmel’s Philosophy of Money and Sociology as well as Max

Weber’s Economy and Society as his main examples. His aim is to demonstrate

that textual style is highly relevant to the meaning of a theorist’s work by identifying

in the texts strategic commitments of classical genres. Whereas Weber’s style of

textual composition according to Green corresponds to the literary practices of

casuistry, the exemplary value of Simmel’s theorizing is to be found in his

dialectical mode of writing. Green’s literary approach to the language of

sociological theorizing offers, in his own words, a new basis for assessing the value

of sociological work.

Poggi, Giancarlo: Money and the modern mind: Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of

Money. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 228 p.

This is the only monograph in English on Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. After

describing in some detail the historical setting in Germany at the end of the 19th

century and Simmel’s position in the German academia, Poggi goes through The

Philosophy of Money starting from its analytic part. He explains what Simmel

understood by economic action and economic value as well as discusses the

central concept of money, its theoretical constitution and historical preconditions.

The succeeding two chapters focus on the synthetic part of Simmel’s work, which

investigates the social and cultural consequences of money and money economy.

The author also presents an interesting interpretation of the Hegelian roots of

Appendix 37

Simmel’s concept of the objective spirit by using Hans Freyer’s work Theorie des

Objektiven Geistes (1923) as an interpretative tool (Freyer was a student of

Simmel’s). As it systematizes the use and development of Simmel’s basic concepts

and analytic themes, Poggi’s work stands out as a particularly useful reader’s guide

and companion to The Philosophy of Money.

Jaworski, Gary D.: Georg Simmel and the American Prospect. New York: State

University of New York Press, 1997, 161 p.

The book examines the American reception of Simmel’s work. The author

investigates the significance of Simmel’s ideas for a variety of North American

authors, ranging from the Chicago sociologists Albion Small, Robert E. Park and

Everett C. Hughes to Erving Goffman, Talcott Parsons, Kaspar D. Naegle, Robert

K. Merton Lewis E. Coser and, finally, postmodernist sociologists Deena

Weinstein and Michael Weinstein. The book brings to light several previously

undiscovered facets of the American Simmel reception by not merely studying

publications by American sociologists for evidence of Simmel’s influence, but also

by looking at their earlier drafts, correspondence, unpublished research notes and

by making use of some interview material, too. What is more, interestingly,

Jaworski’s analysis of the reception goes far beyond the standard line of approach,

as it ties the reception of Simmel’s work to social concerns: to aspirations to

transform American society and influence the American prospect. The story of

Simmel in America is thereby not only a story of the history and development of

sociology in America, but it is also intertwined with the history of America and

with attempts to define the country and shape its future. The book also contains a

reprint of a previously little-known essay by Albert Salomon, a student of

Simmel’s. Jaworski introduces the text, depicts its provenance, and argues for its

significance.

Leck, Ralph M.: Georg Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology. The Birth of

Modernity, 1880–1920. New York: Humanity Books, 2000, 356 p.

Georg Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology traces Simmel’s cultural and political

legacy, linking Simmel to the intellectual history of the European counterculture.

In the book, Simmel appears as a key figure for the understanding of German

modernism, which according to Leck is downright inconceivable without him.

Leck explores Simmel’s relationship to and influence on Expressionism and

shows for example how his notion of culture was incorporated to the early

Expressionist movement. In addition, the book is also the first study to examine

Simmel’s impact on the history of sexual politics. Leck explores Simmel’s writings

on gender and their contribution to the development of radical feminism and the

homosexual rights movement. In the book, Leck also reads Simmel as a

Nietzschean anticapitalist, who renounced the ethical validity of commercial self-

interest.


Cantó Milà, Nàtalia: A Sociological Theory of Value: Georg Simmel's Sociological

Relationalism. Transcript Verlag (distributed by Transaction Publishers), 2005,

250 p.

The book presents a systematic analysis of the sociological theory of value

developed by Simmel in The Philosophy of Money. Cantó Milà argues that when

one reads the theory of value as the leitmotif of The Philosophy of Money, the

book appears much more coherent and systematic than what Simmel’s

investigations of money would seem to suggest. She embeds Simmel’s theory of

value in his broader conception of and approach to sociology. The author

identifies above all Simmel’s relationalism as the epistemological foundation of his

theory of value. In the book she shows how, in contrast to the theories of value

embraced in his day, Simmel understood values not as stable and objective but as

products of human relations. The book also looks at the particular circumstances,

influences and motivations behind The Philosophy of Money and reconstructs its

relational mode of thought.

Pyyhtinen, Olli: Simmel and 'the Social'. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2010, 211 p.

The book argues for Simmel's relevance for the thought of one of the most

fundamental problems of social theory, namely, ‘What is the social?’ Pyyhtinen

suggests that Simmel has a lot to offer to our contemporary concerns. Not only did

Simmel take up society as something in need of explanation rather than as an

explanation, but his understanding of society/the social as relations and processes

also resonates with several processualist and relationalist emphases of

contemporary social theory. Besides explicating Simmel’s social theory and

arguing for its relevance, the book also tries to uncover the philosophical

background of Simmel’s sociology. Pyyhtinen maintains that we cannot fully

understand Simmel’s social theory without paying attention to his philosophy.

Schemer, Henry & Jarry, David: Form and Dialectic in Georg Simmel’s Sociology:

A New Interpretation. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 328

p.

In this book, Schermer and Jarry argue for a view of Simmel as a systematic

theorist, who had a consistent method of inquiry. The authors suggest that we can

identify the method in Simmel’s dialectical mode of thought, perceptible, on the

one hand, in his frequent use of polarities and in the central place that the notion

of Wechselwirkung occupies in his thought, on the other. While the unity of

Simmel’s work and its roots in the dialectical tradition have also been documented

by others, the strength of Schermer and Jarry’s book lies in the thoroughness and

accuracy of the scholarship, both of Simmel’s own works and of the secondary

literature on Simmel. However, that very same thing also makes their book not

very reader-friendly.

Appendix 39

Helle, Horst J.: The Social Thought of Georg Simmel. London: Sage, 2015, 115

p.

This is a new, short but useful introduction to Simmel’s sociological thinking

which explores and emphasizes the potential of his method and concept of

interpretative sociology in studying the major questions of our times. Helle’s

presentation is guided by three main problems to which Simmel devoted his work

and which are highly actual even today: 1) devising and applying a method for a

study of cultural change; 2) exploring the scope of human creativity and freedom

in society; and 3) delineating the limits and reasonable restrictions of such

freedom. It is sociology’s task to develop new ways of looking at familiar things

and problems in a society by analyzing, among others, the relations between

objectified social forms and individual action. After presenting Simmel’s ideas on

ethics, religion, private life, women and marriage, Helle takes up money as

exemplifying the most general form of a social relationship and rounds up his

concise treatise by discussing Simmel’s ideas about the poor person and about life

in general. In the end, Helle recommends – and comments shortly on – Simmel’s

piece 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' as further reading.

Edited volumes on Simmel in English

The volume Georg Simmel edited by Lewis A. Coser includes commentaries on

Simmel’s sociology by several famous classical and latter-day sociologists covering

a wide spectrum of topics. Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology edited by

Michael Kaern, Bernard S. Phillips, and Robert S. Cohen, covers many important

aspects of Simmel’s sociological thinking, including his relation to other

sociologists. Georg Simmel. Critical assessments edited by Frisby and published as

three thick volumes deserves special attention since the volumes present as

complete a collection as possible of commentaries on Simmel’s work published in

English in journals by the time Frisby collected them. It also includes Simmel’s

writings that came out in English during his own lifetime.

Coser, Lewis A. (ed): Georg Simmel. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall 1965, 184 p.

This volume of collected writings on Simmel’s sociology starts with the editor’s

introduction to Simmel’s intellectual career and sociological thinking, which also

includes a short appraisal of Simmel’s intellectual influence. The second part of

the book contains six commentaries of Simmel’s contemporaries on his work,

starting from Emile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies. The third part of the book

presents appraisals of various aspects of Simmel’s work by several well-known later

sociologists. The topics include, for instance, his sociology of forms, sociological

methods as well as alienation and the tragedy of culture. The last part is devoted to


Simmel’s (then current) influence on American sociology and is the most

illuminating in its limited scope of topics: Theodore M. Mills takes up some

hypotheses of small groups and the editor, Coser, of his own special topic, conflict

theory.

Kaern, Michael, Phillips, Bernard S., & Cohen, Robert S. (eds.): Georg Simmel

and Contemporary Sociology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990, 388

p.

One of the explicit aims of this edited volume is to confront the opinion that

according to the introduction written by Kaern has been prevalent among later

sociologists to this day: that Simmel continues to be a puzzlement among leading

sociological interpreters. Simmel’s sociology has often thought to be rich in fresh

ideas but theoretically incoherent, fragmentary and therefore difficult to discern.

Contrary to Durkheim’s works, it does not easily conform to empirical

applications or, unlike the work of Weber, to historical analyses. The volume

consists of several contributions with a wide variety of topics, covering many

important and original aspects of Simmel’s sociological thinking relevant to

modern sociology. Some chapters take up the relation of Simmel’s thinking to

other sociologists, like Parsons, or philosophers, like Schopenhauer.

Frisby, David (ed.): Georg Simmel. Critical assessments, 1-3 vols. London:

Routledge, 1994.

Into these three volumes David Frisby collected a great amount of reviews and

articles about Simmel, almost all of which had been previously published in

English. The three comprehensive volumes are therefore an essential companion

to anyone interested in the reception of Simmel’s sociology in the English-

speaking academia from his own times until the early 1990s. Many articles made

available in these volumes have also been almost forgotten and are often difficult

to find in their original, sometimes rather obscure publications. The first volume

starts with two of Simmel’s own writings which were published in English during

his own life time and on his own initiative, ‘The Problem of sociology’ and

‘Tendencies in German Life and Thought since 1870’. The volume also includes

reviews of Simmel’s major works plus analyses of the early reception of his works

and of his relation to contemporaries. The second volume consists of writings

raising methodological issues in Simmel’s works and discussing his major

sociological works. In addition, it includes articles which cover various substantive

areas, such as his sociology of women and gender. The commentary on

substantive areas continues in volume three with, among others, discussions about

Simmel’s aesthetic sociology and sociology of aesthetics, sociology of emotions

and poverty as well as his thoughts on social medicine. The last section of volume

three presents articles which take up Simmel’s influence on and importance in

American sociology.

Appendix 41

Journals and special issues

This section covers journals and journal special issues devoted to Simmel’s work.

While innumerable articles on Simmel’s as well as translations of his writings have

appeared in various journals all over the world, there also exists a peer-reviewed

academic journal devoted solely to the work of Simmel, as its title Simmel Studies

unambiguously expresses. There is also a number of journal special issues

published on Simmel’s thought. Many of them have appeared in Theory, Culture

& Society. The special issue edited by Mike Featherstone 1991 was the first, and it

focused especially on Simmel's interests in culture, modernity, aesthetics and

individuality. The volume edited by Thomas Kemple 2007 broadened up the

scope of translations of Simmel’s writings, making for example Simmel’s essays on

metaphysics available for the first time to an Anglophone readership. It was

followed by the special issue edited by Austin Harrington and Kemple 2012,

which includes mostly commentaries by contemporary scholars and gives special

emphasis to Simmel's philosophical or trans-sociological work. There are also two

special issues published as tributes to the incredibly important contribution of the

late David Frisby to Simmel scholarship, the one published as an electronic issue

in Theory, Culture & Society, edited by Kemple, and the other in Journal of

Classical Sociology with Nigel Dodd 2013 as the editor.

Simmel Studies 2000– (1991–1999 Simmel Newsletter)

The journal, published since 1991 (though first titled Simmel Newsletter up to

1999), is the central forum for Simmel scholarship. The journal comes out twice a

year and publishes articles in German, English and French (with most of the texts,

however, so far published in German). It is edited in Bielefeld, associated to the

Georg Simmel Gesellschaft.

Featherstone, Mike (ed.): A Special Issue on Georg Simmel. Theory Culture &

Society, 8(3), Aug. 1991.

Simmel’s work has held a central place in the journal Theory, Culture & Society

all the way from its first volumes in the 1980s to the present. Several of the themes

treated by Simmel, as Mike Featherstone, the editor-in-chief, puts it in his

introduction to the journal's first Simmel special issue that came out in 1991,

‘centrally encapsulate the range of issues we have sought to develop in the journal’.

The comprehensive issue contains articles by several prominent Simmel scholars

(e.g. David Frisby, Otthein Rammstedt, Klaus Lichtblau, Donald N. Levine and

Birgitta Nedelmann), translations of shorter pieces by Simmel himself, reviews of

both Simmel and of works on him, as well as a bibliographical note by David

Frisby on Simmel's writings available in English at that time. The translations, all of

which were to reappear later as reprints in the volume Simmel on Culture

published in 1997 and edited by Frisby and Featherstone, display Simmel’s


omnivorous taste for the analysis of a wide range of cultural phenomena, from

money to the alpine journey, the problem of style and trade exhibitions. The

collection also includes a translation of the highly influential obituary of Simmel by

Georg Lukács, in which Lukács depicts Simmel as ‘the most significant and

interesting transitional figure in the whole of modern philosophy’ – as '’he genuine

philosopher of Impressionism’. The contributions by more contemporary scholars

discuss such matters as the relationship of Simmel’s sociology of forms to Weber’s

interpretive sociology, Simmel’s perspective on the aesthetics of modern life, his

philosophy of culture, the relation of culture and gender, sociology of space and

his war writings. There is also open contestation and debate between some of the

authors. For instance, the title of Levine’s article, ‘Simmel as Educator’, refutes

Lukács’ judgment of Simmel as only a great stimulator, not an educator. In their

contribution to the volume, Deena and Michael Weinstein present much more

provocative criticism. The Weinsteins explicitly challenge the influential image of

Simmel as a sociological flâneur put forth by Frisby in his Sociological

Impressionism. The Weinsteins argue that the notion is mistaken and that it is

much more appropriate and accurate to depict Simmel as a bricoleur.

Kemple, Thomas (ed): Simmel: On Aesthetics, Ethics and Metaphysics. Theory,

Culture & Society 24(7-8), 2007.

The special issue, containing a rich variety of translations of Simmel’s pieces,

commemorated the 150th anniversary of Simmel's birth and the 100th anniversary

of the publication of his major work Sociology. The translations presented include

for instance the essay ‘The Philosophy of Landscape’, Simmel's three essays on

Italian cities, the text ‘The Social Boundary’, ‘The Metaphysics of Death’ and ‘The

Problem of Fate’. In his excellent introduction to the volume, the editor Thomas

Kemple develops the notion of ‘allosociality’ and outlines a ‘set of axes of

sociability’ by drawing on the Simmelian a prioris of association. As regards the

translations included in the special issue, Kemple suggests that they not only

extend the corpus of Simmel’s texts available in English but, if they are read

through Simmel’s sociology, they may give us a new, broader and richer

understanding of alternative social theory and what it could look like.

Kemple, Thomas (ed): *David Frisby on Georg Simmel and Social Theory

[http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/collection/georg_simmel_and_social_theory]*. TCS

Special E-Issue. Theory, Culture & Society, 2010.

In the aftermath of the decease of David Frisby (1944-2010), the Special E-Issue,

introduced by Thomas Kemple, pays tribute to Frisby’s lifework by bringing

together all his articles in TCS, his translations of Simmel, other TCS articles with

which he was involved and a review of his Sociological Impressionism.

Appendix 43

Harrington, Austin and Kemple, Thomas (eds.): Georg Simmel’s Sociological

Metaphysics: Money, Sociality and Precarious Life. A special section on Simmel

in Theory, Culture & Society, 29(7-8), Dec. 2012.

As the editors note in their Introduction, the articles brought together in the

collection focus on two intertwined aspects of Simmel’s thought: his metaphysics

of the social and his ideas about money economies. So, whereas the 1991 TCS

Simmel Special Issue centred especially on Simmel’s ideas about culture,

aesthetics, modernity and individuality, the 2012 issue brings to light his more

philosophical or trans-sociological work. The latest scholarly work showcased in

the collection is relatively unanimous in thinking that we cannot settle on depicting

Simmel as a sociological flâneur any more than as a bricoleur whose ideas would

never add up to a coherent theoretical argument, but Simmel's writings do make

up a systematic corpus of work concerned with fundamental questions of human

existence in a world of social turbulence. Accordingly, several of the contributions

to the volume stress the confluence of his sociological and philosophical concerns.

For instance, Hans Blumenberg’s essay translated into English for the collection

suggests that there is a close affinity between Simmel’s notion of life and his

understanding of money: he arrives at the problem of life only via the examination

of money. For Blumenberg, money, seemingly most opposed to life, is thus

Simmel’s ‘proto-metaphor’ for life. The special issue also includes a translation of

Simmel’s essay ‘The Fragmentary Character of Life’ from 1916, that would later

form the second chapter of The View of Life, as well as a selection of his shorter

writings for the journal Jugend, which differ from his more serious and systematic

works in their playfulness and sense of irony. The chronology of Simmel’s works

in English compiled by Thomas Kemple appearing in the volume significantly

updates Frisby’s bibliographical note of the 1991 TCS special issue and presents a

very helpful list of all Simmel’s writings available in English.

Dodd, Nigel (ed): Special issue on Georg Simmel and David Frisby. Journal of

Classical Sociology, 2013, 13(1).

This special issue is compiled in honour of the late David Frisby. The articles

gathered in it treat not only Simmel but also other thinkers and topics that Frisby

was interested in. As Nigel Dodd remarks in his Editorial, all of the contributors

are somehow connected with Frisby – be it as his colleagues or former students or

as colleagues with similar interests.

Works making use of Simmel

Simmel has without doubt inspired many sociologists and cultural philosophers,

both during his lifetime and afterwards, up to this day. He is also a generally

recognized pioneer in the discipline of sociology. However, unlike in the case of


for instance Durkheim and Weber, it is not so easy to find works or authors which

would have made extensive and systematic use of Simmel’s sociology, social theory

or method, relied on Simmel more or less exclusively or applied his sociology

systematically to answer their own research questions. This can certainly be

explained at least partly by his personal style and character of writing. Simmel’s

writings do not offer any ready-made models that could, in any straightforward

manner, be applied in empirical research. Furthermore, it is obviously not

particularly easy to imitate his personal style of reasoning and writing, either. To

the following, we have included only a fairly limited number of books which make

explicit use of Simmel’s work and/or in which Simmel’s ideas play a decisive role

in the interpretations and arguments put forth. The seminal study The Origins of

Totalitarism by Hannah Arendt of the origins of totalitarianism relied on one of

Simmel’s basic figures of thought about secret societies in interpreting the specific

character of the totalitarian political parties. Similarly, Simmel figured as a key

starting point for Coser when the latter developed his theory of social conflicts in

his book The Functions of Social Conflict. Simmel’s Philosophy of Money plays a

central role in Nigel Dodd’s construction of a sociology of money in his books

The Sociology of Money and The Social Life of Money. To Jukka Gronow in

The Sociology of Taste, Simmel’s theory of fashion and ‘sociologization’ of the

Kantian aesthetics of taste offered important tools in analysing modern

consumption. In the book Cityscrapes of Modernity by Frisby, Simmel plays a

crucial role in Frisby’s interpretation of the spatial dynamics of metropolitan

modernity. Veikko Pietilä finds in Simmel’s writings the most workable notion of

society. And, finally, in Messages from Georg Simmel Helle argues that we can

find in Simmel’s work most relevant sociological tools and ideas to our attempts to

understand social phenomena.

Arendt, Hannah: The Origins of Totalitarism. (In German: Elemente und

Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, 1951.) Published in English originally under the title

The Burden of our Time in 1951. New York: World Publishing.

In analyzing the specific character of totalitarian political movements, Russian

Stalinism and German Fascism, Hannah Arendt makes explicit use of Simmel’s

essay on secret societies. The essay, by many regarded as one of his best, appeared

originally in English in 1906 (in The American Journal of Sociology) and was

incorporated into Simmel’s Sociology (1908). According to Arendt, totalitarian

movements differ radically from all other kinds of political parties and resemble

quite closely secret societies, repeating many of their basic features. Contrary to

other parties, the Russian Communists and German Fascists divided the world

into a close circle of inner members and outsiders, demanded absolute loyalty and

subservience from their members to a leader who remained almost a secret and

mystic figure surrounded by a small group of initiated members who in their turn

were surrounded by a bigger group of ‘fellow travellers’. Furthermore, these

movements experienced also the whole surrounding world as alien and hostile.

Appendix 45

Closely following Simmel’s reasoning, Arendt argued further that It is typical of

totalitarian movements that everyone who was not ‘one of us’ or ‘selected’ is

excluded from the movement. The work has come in several editions, translated

into several languages.

Coser, Lewis: The Functions of Social Conflict. New York: The Free Press 1958,

188 p.

Lewis Coser was one of the after-war American sociologists who had a keen

interest in Simmel’s sociology and found it fruitful, for instance, in questioning

some of Talcott Parsons’ sociological functionalism. Coser’s work on social

conflicts is a relatively early attempt to apply and develop creatively some of

Simmel’s sociological concepts and ideas. Coser chose Simmel’s essay on conflict,

originally published as a part of his Sociology, as his primary source in order to

derive from it basic propositions of the sociology of conflicts. Coser preferred

Simmel’s approach to many American sociologists who had also written about

conflicts. To Coser, Simmel offered a consistent general orientation and was

committed to analyzing social phenomena in terms of interactive social processes.

What is equally important, Simmel emphasized the positive functions of conflict

with respect to the internal cohesion and external boundaries of social groups.

Coser’s study is by no means confined to an explication of Simmel’s basic ideas. It

is more ambitious in extracting from Simmel’s exposition those ideas that seem

more relevant to the ‘present day’ sociological thinking which had, in Coser’s

opinion, partly moved beyond the point reached by Simmel.

Dodd, Nigel: The Sociology of Money. Economics, Reason and Contemporary

Society. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994, 211 p.

The book is one of the rare systematic sociological treatises on money published

in recent times. In the spirit of Simmel, it aims at understanding the nature of

money, arguably the most important modern institution, as well as demonstrating

its far-fetching social consequences. It starts with a discussion of the theories of the

sociological classics, Marx, Simmel, Hayek and Parsons, among others, none of

whom, despite their important theoretical contributions, offered in the author’s

opinion a satisfactory account of the character and significance of money in

modern societies, the abstract nature of which makes it admittedly difficult to

capture. Dodd develops his own theoretical synthesis in which the trust in money’s

abstract properties is an essential feature of monetary networks. The centrality of

trust was, as we know, recognized by Simmel too. As Dodd hastens to add trust

essentially depends on symbolic and ideational features of money which are

integral to it as an economic instrument and foundational to the desire to possess

it. It is the primary task of sociological analyses of money to clarify these symbolic

features of money. For instance, as Dodd argues, money empowers irrespective of

wealth, class or status.


Gronow, Jukka: The Sociology of Taste. London: Routledge, 1997, 199 p.

By comparing, among others, Simmel’s work with that of Pierre Bourdieu’s, the

book analyses Simmel’s contribution to the sociology of taste and consumption. In

his interpretation, Gronow emphasizes the theoretical importance of the aesthetic

or play-forms of association in Simmel’s sociology. Fashion and sociability are two

of Simmel’s well-known examples of such social forms which are aesthetic by their

nature. They make obvious the intellectual debt of Simmel sociology of social

forms to Immanuel Kant’s third critique, The Critique of Judgment and his

anthropological writings. Simmel was not only interested in the sociological

analyses of art and aesthetics but developed in fact something that could, with

good reasons, be called aesthetic sociology. To Simmel, fashion which ‘both is and

is not’ is an empirical solution to Kant’s famous antinomy of taste. Ideally, it is

based only on the subjective judgments of taste but is, at the same time, necessarily

shared by others. Sociability in its turn, just like any object of pure aesthetic taste,

in contrast to the objects of sensual taste, poses the form of being purposiveness

without in reality serving any external goal or purpose.

Frisby, David: Cityscapes of Modernity. Critical Explorations. Cambridge: Polity

Press, 2001, 392 p.

This book shows the remarkable significance of Simmel in the thought of David

Frisby. On the one hand, Frisby reads Simmel's theorizing on modernity in

reference with the aesthetic idea of modern experience developed by Baudelaire.

On the other hand, drawing on The Philosophy of Money, Frisby looks at the

modern metropolis as a network woven by the circulation of money. The book

consists of seven thematically independent essays, which examine modern

cityscapes mostly in Berlin, Vienna and Paris between 1830 and 1930. Its leitmotif

and main question has to do with the possibilities and modes of experiencing,

representing and structuring the modern metropolis, that is, with the different

aspects of spatial practices, representations and products. In a dramaturgical sense,

different social types or figures of urbanites act in the leading role. These include

the stranger, the blasé person, the adventurer and the calculating individual from

Simmel as well as Walter Benjamin's flâneur, detective and the researcher. To this

diverse bunch Frisby himself adds the architect and the city planner. With the help

of all these figures Frisby manages to illustrate not only the kind of people who live

in the modern metropolis but also how the metropolis and its inner dynamics are

represented. Whilst Simmel appears in the book above all as a source of

information and inspiration, the book also offers Frisby's rich and detailed reading

of Simmel's metropolis essay and of its production history. In addition, Frisby also

supplements the piece with missing aspects to be found in other texts by Simmel,

so that Simmel's understanding of the modern metropolis ultimately comes to the

fore as an intersection of texts instead of approaching it based on the metropolis

essay alone. In the book, Frisby focuses especially on the debate between Berlin

and Vienna. He succeeds in illustrating in a convincing and eloquent manner that

Appendix 47

it concerned not only the difference between the two cities, but also the opposition

between the modern and the pre-modern, new and old, civilization and culture.

Pietilä, Kauko: Reason of Sociology: George Simmel and Beyond. London: Sage,

2011, 202 p.

This book develops what its author calls 'reason of sociology', in opposition to the

reason of state. Pietilä sets as his aim the rehabilitation of the concept of society,

and it is from Simmel that he finds the most workable notion of society, stressing

the idea of society as association and interaction. While not being a study on

Simmel per se, the book also dissects the problems of Simmel's sociology. Pietilä

observes how Simmel vacillates between communal values and culture, on the one

hand, and interactions and society, on the other. According to the author, the

critical condition of the outbreak of World War I made Simmel turn his back to

his sociological programme. Ultimately, then, Pietilä's ambition is to expand

Simmel’s programme beyond where he himself stopped. He applies Simmel's

concepts to examine money, mass communication and the state as examples of

three societal institutions operated by people practicing society professionally.

Helle, Horst, J.: Messages from Georg Simmel. Leiden, Brill 2013, 201 p.

As the title of the book suggests, the author encourages us to learn from Simmel’s

basic methodological and theoretical approaches, not only for the reasons of

understanding the history of sociological ideas, but in order to develop them as

tools highly relevant to our present-day attempts at understanding social

phenomena. He coins his lessons into five thematic questions discussed in

separate chapters. The first chapter concerns the message of interpretation and

Simmel’s interpretation of the ‘operation called Verstehen’ central to humanities.

It takes up under critical scrutiny also Simmel’s relation to pragmatism. The

second chapter is devoted to Simmel’s teachings about the centrality of change and

evolution of societies which should be approached as being in a state of continual

formation and deformation instead of fixed social institutions and formations. The

third message reminds us of Simmel’s basic idea that society emerges in

interaction and is in a state of a process. Sociology is essentially a study of the

various forms of association or social interaction. In other words, social relations

and neither individuals nor institutions are the primary objects of sociological

study. The fourth chapter takes up the role of monetary relations as paradigmatic

cultural processes and money’s role in cultural objectification and alienation. The

chapter also discusses Simmel’s understanding of socialism as a logical

consequence of some of the basic mechanisms of a modern society. Finally, in the

fifth chapter the author compares Simmel’s messages with two of his main

challengers or fellow-travellers, Karl Marx and Max Weber, in developing a social

theory of modernity and modernization.


Dodd, Nigel, The Social Life of Money. Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2014, 444 p.

The book covers a great variety of topics and presents various sociological analyses

of the uses of money, its social and cultural conditions as well as its consequences,

referring also extensively both to Simmel’s Philosophy of Money and his other

relevant writings. One of the chapters is devoted to Simmel’s – in Dodd’s

interpretation utopian – idea of perfect money which would price commodities

differently to different groups of people depending on their relative wealth and

capacity to pay.

appendix - macmillanihe.com resources (by author)/p... · simmel’s collected works have been...

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